Last night, while escaping the house and the shrieks of an angry child who would not go to bed, I went to Venetian Moon in Reading, MA. I had a voucher for reduced price cuisine which had an expiration date of yesterday. Funny, that.
At any rate, I arrived all of 20 minutes before they close the doors. I was peckish but did not need a huge entree. I ordered three items from their appetizers and tapas menus, partly to get to near the value of my voucher: stuffed mushrooms ($9), eggplant rollatini ($10), and tortellini al forno ($10). The mushroom caps were filled with a mushroom stuffing. I normally don't get stuffed mushrooms because there is usually shellfish or pork hanging around in the stuffing somewhere, so I got to enjoy my first stuffed mushrooms in years. And I did enjoy. The eggplant rollatini was close to an entree size for me. I did try one of the four rolled slices of eggplant. Each was stuffed with ricotta and baked with sauce and mozzarella. There was a nice garlic flavor in there as well. I took home the rest. The standout dish, though, was the tortellini. It was served in a port wine and basil cream sauce, and some of the port had been absorbed by the pasta. It was, I have to tell you, heavenly. I didn't finish it there, but after I got home I polished off the rest. As I was seated upstairs at the bar, I asked about how kid-friendly the place was. My server informed me that adults do bring their kids earlier in the evening, so they are not wholly foreign. Prices are a little steep without a voucher or coupon, so you might want to save it for a special occasion; but the food is worthy.
The thing was, the flavor of the tortellini got into my head. It tasted so good! The cream sauce, the wine, and the lovely cheese tortellini made an excellent dish that was also rare in my taste experience. Tonight, some hours after ingesting some take-out cheese pizza from my local Costco -- which is actually reasonably tasty, though not gourmet -- I wanted to see if I could make some of my own port-infused pasta. I was just off-balance enough at the time to actually try this. Interestingly enough, it worked!
I did not use a huge pot to boil my pasta, just a saucepan, but you can do this with a larger pot if you want. I had about 1/4 pound of dry De Cecco linguini fini, which I boiled for about a minute less than the directions stated. I drained my pasta, then put somewhere around 1/4 cup of port into my now-empty saucepan, which was narrow enough so it had a small amount of depth. I turned the heat back up to medium-high. As soon as the wine started to show signs of some sort of bubbling I put the pasta back in the saucepan. I occasionally stirred my pasta in the port for around 75-90 seconds, as the heat distribution was not as even as with a pot full of water. At the end of that I added some jarred pasta sauce (Trader Joe's Arribata sauce, $2.99) and grated some fresh Romano cheese I keep in the fridge. The port did indeed cook into the pasta, giving some lovely extra flavor. There was a little bit of port that did not go in the pasta and mixed with the sauce instead, but I definitely tasted the port in the pasta.
I had taken home-grade ingredients, albeit good quality ones, and used them to make a dish I'd consider worthy of a good Italian restaurant. That's a decent night's work, if I do say so myself.
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