Roasted Peppers and Sun-Dried Tomatoes Pasta--Comfort Food that Makes Us Feel at Home Anywhere in the World

We move, we travel, we visit again the places where we were born. We miss a childhood home we left behind and back there, again, we miss the place we live now. We look for the perfect place on earth, a place that does not really exist because such place means something different to each of us.

In my home town, an artist I was buying jewelry from asked me where I came from. I hesitated for a long moment as I could not find an answer immediately. Half of my life I lived in Poland, the other half I was thrown from one place to another, ending up in the US. I do not know where I feel more at home--in the place where people speak my native tongue, or in the place where they speak the native tongue of my kids. She saw me pondering and tried to help "I think home is where most memories come from". "The nicest memories" she added. And I still wonder where my best memories come from.

I came back and put my suitcases in the hall of our DC home. I left them unpacked for a couple of days, suspended like myself between my past and present life. I just took out the papers and the beautiful small dishes I bought for my new pictures, a notebook with the new and the long forgotten recipes, and bags of "smuggled" spices.

I headed for the perfect place on earth--my kitchen, where I can create the best of all worlds with Polish bread, Italian pasta, French salad, Portuguese dessert, and Californian wine. I am sure I am not the only one feeling that way. I realized that, after a month of my native cuisine, I got to miss pasta--my comfort food that will make me feel at home again.

I know many pasta recipes and got some of them from my Italian friends, but this recipe was totally my own creation. Perhaps something similar already exists in Italy, but for this exact version I am ready to take all the compliments and complaints.

Roasted Peppers and Sun-Dried Tomatoes Pasta
(For six people)

Ingredients:
1 box of pasta, I use Barilla's penne,
3 red or yellow bell peppers,
1 medium red onion,
1 cup sun dried tomatoes,
1 cup table cream,
1/3 cup slivered roasted almonds,
1/3 cup flat leaves parsley,
2 tbsp olive oil,
salt and pepper,
freshly ground Parmesan cheese.

Preparation:
1. Roast the peppers until their skin becomes black. This step can be made ahead; roasted peppers can be stored in a refrigerator for up to three days. If you use an electric oven you can roast whole peppers or cut them in halves, remove the seeds and put the pepper halves skin up on a baking tin as close to the broil as possible. If you have a gas stove, you can stuck the whole pepper on a fork and roast it over the gas burner. Put the roasted peppers on a dish, cover them immediately with a lid, and keep them covered until they cool down. Then remove the blackened peel--the better roasted the pepper, the easier the peel will come off. Cut each pepper into quarters and then into stripes.
2. Cook pasta al dente in salted water.
3. Cut the onion in half and slice into thin slices.
4. Strain the sun-dried tomatoes from the oil and cut into smaller stripes. Save the oil.
5. If you have enough of the oil from the tomatoes you can use it for frying the onion.
6. When onion becomes transparent, add peppers and let them fry on a low heat for about 5 minutes.
7. Add tomatoes and about 1/4 cup of water, cook for 1 minute, and add the cream.
8. Mix the sauce gently, season with salt and pepper (If you have a Vegeta spice mix available, you can add a teaspoon of it, but then reduce the amount of salt), add almonds and let the sauce cook for 5 minutes.
9. Pour the sauce on hot pasta, finish with chopped parsley and as much of the freshly shredded Parmesan as you like.

This pasta, as all others, tastes best with one or two glasses of red wine, and followed with baby green salad.

White Cabbage Salad--Polish Ingredients, German Way

What can I possibly post on my last day of vacation in Poland? Cabbage, of course! But since this is almost a one-ingredient dish I will have to tell the story how this very low calorie and healthy salad got onto my family menu, especially that--which may seem surprising--this is not a Polish recipe.

Many years ago, still during the communist times, I went with my parents on vacation to our western neighbors--a tiny town called Friedrichroda in then East Germany, very close to the border with West Germany. You cannot even imagine how western it felt there then! Store shelves were filled up with a great variety of very desirable products: Salamander shoes, corduroy pants, a huge choice of wallpapers, not to mention the great variety of attractive looking food. The only regret was that we could not buy much for our limited allowance of GDR marks.

Every day's highlight were though the copious meals that we were served at the resort. It was a "lavish" Swedish buffet where you could eat as much as you wanted, which some people really tried, endlessly filling up their plates. The choice was wonderful, especially cold meats, which at that time we could only dream of in Poland, but also breads and salads. The most disappointing were desserts--tasteless, and not even sweet at all.

We liked the white cabbage salad particularly well. It was made from a very familiar ingredient--a mainstay of Polish cuisine--but was served in an unfamiliar way. We put our broken German through a strenuous test and got the recipe. Ever since, for more than thirty years, we have been having it at hour home. The only difference is we do not serve it as a self-standing salad but only with dinners--it enhance very good with meat, even grilled ones, and most of all with fish, especially fried in breadcrumbs.

So if you are tired of green salads and looking for something easy and healthy, this salad is an option rich in vitamins A, B1, B12, and C. It is always a huge hit at our deck parties and disappears fast, earning praises for its uniquely refreshing taste.

Shredded White Cabbage Salad

Ingredients:
1/2 medium white cabbage (it actually should be young and still green),
1/2 cup flat-leaved Italian parsley,
1/2 cup chopped dill,
1 tbsp sugar,
1 lemon,
salt and pepper.

Preparation:
1. Shred the cabbage very thinly, put in a bowl, salt with about 1/2 tsp of salt, squeeze with hands slightly to help salt to penetrate and soften the cabbage, and aside for about 20-30 min.
2. Add sugar and lemon juice--you need to try how sour and sweet you like it to be--it should be sweet but the sour taste should dominate.
3. Put in dill and parsley, mix together, and serve.

Can be made even hours ahead and served straight from the refrigerator, especially on a hot day, for instance with grilled meats.

Pears in Chocolate Sauce--A Perfect Vacation Finale

When I went through my recent posts I thought that it was time for a dessert again. And, although you cannot deny that the fall is approaching, last days of summer can be still hot making fruit desserts most desirable.

As a child, I never liked the time when apples and pears were ripening in our little orchard. It meant that the school year was about to begin and cold and rainy months were coming. On one of the three radio stations we had, Joe Dassin, my then French pop idol, was singing his deeply nostalgic "Indian Summer", perfectly in tune with my increasingly melancholic mood.

But late summer and early fall in DC is a very joyful season. It is warm and sunny. Skies are clear and air is fresh. With the end of the punishing heat and humidity, it is the time when relaxed people are coming back to town from vacations. School will start soon and will keep our kids busy. Meanwhile, we have a lot of memories to share over dinners and wine with our cosmopolitan friends.

The real fall in DC is not so much about pears, which are available almost the whole year round, but pumpkins. It really comes in late October, when farmers start to sell pumpkins at their seasonal markets.

So with this little pear dessert I am not trying to rush the fall in but would like it to be a celebration of the vacation end and all the beauty of the late summer. It is a simple and elegant dessert and can impress any fruit lover with a sweet tooth. I think it has its roots in the Hungarian cuisine but stand to be corrected on this score.

Pears in Chocolate Sauce
(Six servings)

Ingredients:
3 firm pears,
1 cup water,
1/2 cup sweet wine,
2 tbsp sugar,
1 vanilla pod, if available,
1 tbsp lemon juice,
1/2 cup ground walnuts,
2 tbsp powdered sugar,
2-4 tbsp sour cream,
1 cup good quality dark chocolate; I like to use dark Lindt, or semi-sweet chocolate chips,
2-4 tbsp milk, but have some extra amount handy just in case.

Preparation:
1. Peel the pears, cut in half, and remove seeds leaving a round hollow space in their place.
2. In a pot, boil water, wine, lemon juice, sugar and the vanilla seeds from the vanilla pod together for 1 minute.
3. Place pears' halves in syrup and let them cook for about 8-10 minutes.
4. Remove pears from the hot syrup and cool down on a plate.
5. Mix walnuts with powdered sugar and cream to achieve a smooth and thick cream.
6. Melt chocolate in milk--it can be done over the boiling water, in a microwave oven, or very slowly on a stove, but you need to stir it all the time. You may need to add more milk to obtain a sauce-like consistency, depending on the type of chocolate you use.
7. Place pears on a dessert plate inside up and fill them with the walnut paste, creating a small mound sticking out.
8. Pour a cooled down chocolate sauce over, decorate with mint leaves and serve.

In the original recipe pears should be cooked in syrup, but recently I baked them at 375F for about 10 minutes in two-three tablespoons of sweet wine with two tablespoons of sugar added to it and they also tasted delicious. It seems to be a simpler method as well.