Food Doof Challenge, Day 6: Pasta alla Partial Puttanesca

Last night's wedding was absolutely beautiful, and the food delicious, even beyond the fact that it was not frozen spinach sauteed in Memphis barbecue sauce that I rustled up from the back of the fridge. I'll write about the wedding more tomorrow, after the final episode of the Food Doof, but for now, I will let you know that the part where Lawyer Boy dropped me in the middle of the dance floor was less delicious than the almond wedding cake with Irish Cream filling.

Tonight I had planned to make pasta (fettucine, from a box in the cabinet) with puttanesca sauce, which is one of our perennial favorites. For the uninitiated, puttanesca roughly translates from Italian as "whore," so obviously, we at The Fumbling could not care less what it tastes like, but we are all about making Whore Sauce. Puttanesca is named after Ye Olde Italiane Whores because it's quick and easy (I am not making this up), but beyond that, it's a tomato-based sauce containing garlic, onions, artichokes, anchovies, green olives, and my lovechild, capers. Our favorite restaurant, Avenue 805, does a fantastic puttanesca, and even though LB spares no love for anchovies or green olives, he sucks that stuff down like, well, an Italian whore.

After my little affairette with the tomato saucentrate the other night, I had lots of tomato sauce left over, since one pizza doesn't take a whole lot. I decided to marry that "sauce" with the artichoke hearts and capers in the cabinet, along with a chopped onion and the end of the fresh garlic, for a partial puttanesca. We didn't have anchovies or green olives, but you can't taste them and LB picks them out, respectively, so I didn't feel like we were creating "Jeopardy!" without Alex Trebek over here. I sauteed the onion and minced garlic in olive oil and went to add the tomato sauce, turning the Tupperware upside down to pour the sauce in...and the sauce did not move.

Personal note to tomato sauce: Hi, my name's Grace. We played this game Friday night. Remember? I almost threw you away because you were a dry, pasty whore, but then I added to you the entirety of the Atlantic Ocean and we were good to go for saucy delight. And now? When did you get so thirsty? Now, when I want you to be a whore of a sauce, when I am begging you to be a whore of a sauce, you have transformed back into a mealy brick of seasoned tomato glue? Please. A little justice for the Food Doof, you...whore.

Once I had pried the tomato block out of the Tupperware and nestled it into the sizzling onions, garlic, capers, and artichokes, I poured in some chicken broth, and added in a liberal glug of white wine. I added kosher salt and cayenne pepper, and a dash of white wine vinegar, and covered the sauce to simmer and think about what it did. About forty-five minutes later, when we were ready for dinner, I boiled the fettucine. Upon stirring the thick, tangy sauce into the finished pasta, I threw in a bunch of basil from our garden, because what is life without a chiffonade of basil? And because LB grows mad crazy plants.

Seriously. No holds barred. This was THE BEST DISH so far in Food Doof Challenge Week; so delicious, in fact, that I wrote the recipe down to recreate it at a time when I'm not culinarily unstable. Everything really came together perfectly. The sauce thickened up just right, and when I tossed it with the starch-laden freshly-cooked pasta, it clung to the noodles in just the right way to prevent the noodles from floating in a watery mess of sodden sauce and vegetable bitlets. Put simply, it was absolutely delicious, which leaves me concerned that tomorrow's dinner, the final hurrah in Food Doof Week, will just not be able to measure up.

For tomorrow night, I do have one grand finale planned, not so much in the meal, but in the form of a dessert that I've been throwing around in my head all week. It will either be spectacularly delicious, or spectacularly, mind-blowingly horrendous. Either way, it will be the perfect finish to the Food Doof Challenge!