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Besciamella is traditional for this Bolognese dish; the smooth, creamy texture suits silky, tender, hand-produced egg noodles.

Grittier texture of ricotta is less complementary, though it certainly is used in stuffed pastas made with egg-based sfoglia (pasta dough).

Substituting ricotta for a white sauce is an Italian-American practice, probably derived from the number of Southern Italian dishes which either mix or layer the fresh cheese with other ingredients including cooked, dried pasta (made with hard wheat and no eggs) before baking.

Indian, of course.

Cf. the recipe for chicken salad in the first cookbook for Union Square Cafe?

It's full of vegetables, including grated radishes and green beans that provide bulk. Just limit the bacon (I can't recall if it's part of the recipe or something I add) so there's just a little bit for the sake of enhancing flavor. Wonderful.

I also think you can get a lot of flavor from poaching chicken, especially if you're creative in liquids. E.g. orange juice and sage. If you don't have homemade stock, a can of low-sodium broth might be doctored w white wine, parsley, onion, fennel stalks, carrot...

However, there's nothing wrong w a little olive oil from a recyclable bottle, especially if you have a grill pan.

N.B. Grapes are packed with calories.

Canola mayo has fewer calories than most light versions of commercial mayo, though I am sure FAGO (or other drained yogurts vs. cream-rich labne) is satisfying. Plain old ordinary yogurt strikes me as too liquid in such quantities.

I also like making a tahini sauce (the kind that involves whipping in lots of lemon juice and then mixing in salt-crushed garlic) and blending that with thickened, drained yogurt as a binding agent. Adds flavor to otherwise tasteless water-packed tuna, too.

P.S. I have no problems with Robin's distinction between the dishes on menus in Italian-American restaurants and the recipes in Hazan's book. It's true that red sauce over here has its roots in Naples, Calabria, Puglia, etc., but it's usually not the same thing. Nor would someone stepping off the plane from Palermo recognize what Adam Kuban is calling Sicilian pizza.

I'm more concerned about the alarming rate at which we are depleting the world's supply of seafood, cause enough to curtail the amount of fish we consume.

Farro

Thank you for responding. I trust your intentions were primarily to inform and entertain rather than to mock. Still, if your friend actually used the word "simplistic", he was being judgmental; the word always has pejorative connotations.

The idea that a sea cucumber might serve as an aphrodisiac--or EDT--seems hardly arbitrary given both its shape and the properties the organism shares with the genitals of aroused men.

Rather, the medicinal tradition you report is associative in nature.

Chinese traditional medicine is not alone in this regard. De Materia medicae is the Latin name of an ancient text written by the Greek physician Dioscorides that was copied and richly illustrated by medieval artists in Byzantium and the Islamic world. Christians saw in the botanical images of the blackberry what Dioscorides did not: the Burning Bush of Moses--by virtue of resemblance--and Mary, given theological practice of seeing the Old Testament fulfilled in the New. Thus, the plant no longer was viewed merely as a cure for diarrhea, etc. and given its link to Christ's mother, a stress was placed on its ability to stem the bleeding of women.

Since I am neither a medical doctor nor a herbalist, I don't know how many of the 1st-century beliefs persist in modern medicine or folk remedies. However, I doubt many surgeons are able to cite Dioscorides since his treatise is no longer of great cultural significance and we can relegate it to the past, treating it as a historical document rather than superstition.

I wonder how old the beliefs about the restorative properties of sea cucumbers are and what factors we might point to in understanding their persistence.

Toasted walnuts and blue cheese (Gorgonzola) are a classic combination with beets. Sauté minced shallot or garlic clove in butter. Add heavy cream to taste w a T or two of grated Parmesan. Reduce. Gorgonzola. Melt. Toss in cooked noodles. Top w crumbled nuts, Parm & a little minced parsley.

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Buy a bunch of beets w healthy greens. Separate stalks from leaves and bulbs from all. Roast the beets (bulbs or beetroots) at 400 F, wrapped in foil for an hour or till tender when pierced. Rub off skins. Dice.

You can use stalks if you'd like, boiled in large pot of salted water, then chopped and sautéed w some garlic or shallots, or leave them out since they're better for dried pasta, and find a separate recipe for a gratin.

Boil leaves in large pot salted water for 5 minutes or till tender. Drain and rinse and dry and chop.

Augment the blue cheese and walnut dish with these--or just use the cream with the leaves, sautéeing. Toss in the cubes of roasted beets.

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Buy prepared guacamole. Mix in some horseradish and heat over a low flame until it colors. Add ketchup if you'd like before tossing in the fettuccine, though I find Cool Whip more appealing. Drizzle with white truffle oil and sprinkle with sesame seeds.

Cooking the Roman Way is a beautiful cookbook filled with photographs and carefully researched recipes that David Downie supplements with relevant historical and cultural background. Don't be put off by the author's name--he knows the city intimately and fills his pages with advice gathered by speaking with chefs, home cooks, market vendors and other natives who know their stuff. (Mario Batali is one of the big names who sing praises for his efforts.)

I am linking his recipe, below, at the end of this post.

No mushrooms. No cream. No wine. No onions--though I love Michel Richard's playful riff on the dish:). If you're someplace like New York, Boston or Philadelphia, seek out guanciale instead of pancetta or bacon (list is in order of preference). A little olive oil. Eggs. Parm. Romano. Salt and pepper. Nothing else, other than the pasta which is penne at the restaurant most closely associated with the dish, though spaghetti is what many of us prefer.

The trick to non-scrambled eggs in sauce is the method used in cooking: crisp your guanciale (or...) cubes in olive oil first. Wait 3 minutes. Then pour in the beaten eggs (1 extra yolk) you've seasoned w a little cheese. Drain pasta. Dump in the pan with all the other ingredients, toss quickly, cover, wait one minute, uncover! Amazing w tons of black pepper and extra cheese.

Recipe alone is worth the book, but as promised, here are the instructions in recipe form:
http://www.ichef.com/recipe.cfm?task=display&itemid=279180&recipeid=110613

Kang: You don't say where you live or what your levels of culinary knowledge or skill are. However, you may not realize that whenever there's a reference to fresh noodles, chances are that fresh egg pasta marketed for Italian dishes would serve as a good substitute, though there are lots of supermarkets where I live that carry fresh Chinese noodles in the dairy case. Googling "lo mein noodles" might lead you to this conclusion since you're bound to find a definition indicating they're made w wheat flour and egg. As for ginger-sesame vinaigrette, there's probably a recipe in the cookbook that's being promoted. Given the name of the salad dressing, I bet you could come up with a recipe easily yourself as long as you can find sesame seeds, toasted Asian sesame oil and fresh ginger root. Maybe some rice vinegar.

I own an earlier edition of this book. Photos are lovely, I agree.

I imagine it's very useful for culinary professionals at spas and in jobs that demand creative alternatives to upscale institutional food--even journalists who need to learn how to analyze nutritional benefits of recipes they write. Each recipe has charts breaking down nutritional information, and browsing this, the home cook might find some useful information.

An impressive amount of knowledge is clearly behind the text, though it's a shame Michael Ruhlman was not asked to lend a single, unifying voice to dull, uninspired writing. Constraints imposed on instructors to address each topic in concise, titled sections show. Lots of suggestions for cooking with less to no fat, ditto re salt. I was disappointed in that (1) the discussion of vitamins (2 pages) and other nutrients factored into Daily Requirements is cursive rather than detailed; (2) the concept of health is viewed almost exclusively in terms of weight loss. There's not even a chart that tells me to eat kale since it provides X and Y which my body needs for the sake of Z. Nor have I been inspired to prepare a single recipe. I pity the CIA student who has to study this and the instructor forced to the material.

The home cook might find more in McGee or a book written by a talented cook who adores and cooks a wide variety of foods, and whose dishes aren't always drenched in cream, butter or glistening with browned belly fat. Most attractive along the lines of recent "healthful" books by a gifted culinary teacher is Peter Reinhart's book on baking with whole grains. I like the fact that a single, idiosyncratic voice registers on each page along with experience and a passion for his subject.
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THIS IS NOT A RESPONSE TO THE QUESTION. I DO NOT WISH TO WIN A COPY OF THIS BOOK. Thanks.

Karyn: Blush. Sorry for the remedial lesson and underestimating your savvy as a consumer. I don't read enough here to gauge various degrees of culinary or botanical knowledge; in the real world, I meet 20-something home cooks who learned how to shape gnocchi before they lost their baby teeth and those who live on Marshmallow Fluff, Lean Cuisine and peeled, pre-cut, plastic wrapped vegetables from Trader Joe's ;) they zap in the microwave.
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Catharine: Gelson's is a whole 'nother world. You are lucky to be surrounded by the bounty of Californian farms where the growing season is longer than ours.

FYI Giant is a supermarket chain in the Maryland/Virginia/D.C. area that was, until recently, locally owned; it was taken over by a large Dutch firm which has systematically, and to my mind, successfully lured shoppers from one of its largest competitors, Safeway, by slashing prices, especially on non-perishable goods. It also improved the quality of produce greatly, and still tends to be less expensive than Safeway.

Karyn: I think you're learning a valuable lesson in that it pays to shop around and compare prices, or at least, vary your destinations when food shopping since you have a wealth of options. (I'll get to the persimmons, shortly.) Most people don't, especially due to time constraints and priorities.

For all its cost-cutting, Giant is Old School when it comes to items viewed as exotic for average US citizens, i.e., the kind that would have no problem with microwave popcorn or store-bought butternut squash soup. Go look in the cheese department where prices for Parmigiano Reggiano are outrageous. Even American cheddar from brands sold at Whole Foods or natural foods stores cost more.

Same with persimmons. BTW, don't fault the produce dept. for puny little persimmons. That's what Fuyu persimmons are supposed to look like. The advantage is you can eat them when they're only semi-ripe, raw; great peeled, sliced thinly, in salad. Until just this past week, Giant and Whole Foods were charging the same price. Rodman's has the other type, Hachiya, which must be mushy; only $1.29 each recently.

Despite its reputation, Whole Foods is often, surprisingly, a lot less expensive than traditional chain stores for certain items, if rarely for produce. Dairy prices are lower for the store's brand (not organic, but unlike Giant, cows are not fed growth hormones, etc.) and for organic than at most stores. Spices, King Arthur flour and certain bulk items. Tofu. Kosher salt. And surprisingly, in some cases, meat and poultry.

WF's principal competition in these area is Trader Joe's; the price war is strategic and you need to be the judge. (My opinion of TJ differs from yours. For example, its dairy tends to expire rapidly, even if the prices are comparable. Cheap peanut butter is runny since cost is cut by larger percentage of oil, yet most of the dried fruits are comparable or superior, and often less expensive.)

At the height of the growing season, the farmer's market offers bargains.