Wednesday, October 04, 2006

Baked angel hair timbale

This dish really has a "WOW" factor when you bring it to the table. It's based on a recipe in Giada's Family Dinners by Giada De Laurentiis. Giada's recipe called for using 6 Japanese eggplants, but since I was making the dish for someone who was unsure about eggplant, so I used only one. In place of the rest of the eggplants, I used red and green peppers and zucchini. I sauteed all the vegetables with some garlic until tender. I removed the vegetables and then in the same pan, I cooked some Italian sausage (turkey sausage would work great here.). Once the sausage was cooked through, I added some good red wine and simmered it until the wine reduced. Then in a big bowl, I combined the vegetables, sausage, 3 cups of homemade marinara sauce, and red pepper flakes. When well-combined, I added cooked angel hair pasta and again stirred well and allowed to cool. While that was cooking, I rolled out puff pastry and transferred it to a springform pan. Then to the cooled pasta mixture, added grated parmesan cheese and 1 pound of diced mozzarella cheese. I poured the entire mixture into the springform pan and covered it with more puff pastry and then trimmed and pinched the edges to seal them. It then baked for 90 minutes. You've probably already concluded (if you have read all of this) that this was a rather time and labor-intensive dish. But, when I removed the finished dish from the springform pan and cut into it, inhaling the savory aromas and feasting my eyes on the rich colors and textures, I knew even before I tasted it, all the time and effort had been worth it. Baked angel hair timbale...dazzling, dramatic, and DELICIOUS...

1 Comments:

Blogger Brandi Hart said...

I cooked the same recipe tonight for dinner. It is definitely a show-stopper! I've already started brainstorming other twists on the idea. Tonight, I traded the sausage for ground beef, spinach and bell pepper for the eggplant, and swiss cheese for the mozzarella and parm. It was "use whatever I find" night. Yummy!

7:17 PM  

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