04/16/08

8 oz.     fresh or drained, canned peaches, chopped roughly

6 oz.     tart, firm apples, large dice

2 oz.     sweet white wine (like chardonnay)

4 oz.     Marsala

8 oz.     heavy cream

2 t.       cinnamon

1 t.       ground nutmeg

2 T.      sugar (more or less to taste)

4 oz.     butter

10 oz.   long, wide pasta

Melt butter over medium heat.  Add apples and peaches, increase heat to high and sauté until apples start to soften and brown on the edges.  Deglaze pan with white wine, add remaining ingredients (except pasta).  Reduce sauce by 1/2, toss with pasta and serve.

Note from GG:  Slow nights at Ciao Italia are really the genesis for some of my best recipes.  On this particular occasion, I was busy cutting up a bunch of roasted pumpkins for freezing when the idea struck me.  First of all, and Chef Stephan can attest to this, I've been *dying* to do a sweet pasta dish.  It's one of those things that you think just can't happen (though Iron Chef Kobe proved otherwise with his fabulous banana-stuffed cocoa ravioli), and thus it makes me hunger to do it.  Please note that this only deals with the culinary world for me, though I've been known to be curious about damn near everything.

Anyway!  After having a decent success with the first autumn pasta recipe, I thought I'd give it another go, this time with the sweet bent.  I chopped up the pumpkin, made the sauce and all that jazz and was just FLOORED by the aroma coming from the pan.  To paraphrase Tom Bodett, it's like climbing into bed.  Warm, earthy, sweet...just the epitome of everything a cold month dish needs to be.  Unfortunately, the pumpkin didn't bring the right flavour to the party.  The texture was perfect, but it just wasn't quite sweet enough.  Hence, the substitutions of apples and peaches in the finished version.

The sugar content may need to be tweaked down a bit according to the sweetness of your fruit, and I suppose you could also use a little itty bitty bit of the peach nectar as your sweetness if you felt so inclined.  Cooking is all about making the dish your own, after all!

If you want to get *really* fun, you could also do this:  Make the dish, but use short pasta instead, like penne or ziti (rigatoni might be too big, shells might be too small).  Throw the whole lot into a casserole, top it with a bit of sharp cheddar cheese and bake it until bubbly.  If you want it saucy, you could add more cream, if you want to cut it, leave  it as is.  Either way, you WILL get applause.  Yummy, yummy stuff.

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