December 7, 2012, Something old becomes Something New: Dinner – PPI Spaghetti with Clam Sauce

Last Friday night we made Spaghetti with clam sauce for dinner with fresh manila clams from Costco ($3.49/lb.)  This Friday we were tired and did not want to create a big meal.  So I took the PPI clam sauce and the PPI spaghetti mixed with the spaghetti with Pesto from a previous meal of PPI Lamb and sauteed spahetti in pesto sauce that was combined with the PPI plain spaghetti in a bag. 

Suzette combined the PPI spaghetti with the PPI Clams and Clam Sauce in a large enamel casserole and I stripped the threads off ½ cup of sugar snap peas and added those to the mix and Suzette heated the whole concoction until it became a clam soup with noodles.  The result was wonderful, because the spaghetti softened and absorbed the clam and pesto sauce's flavors.

I opened a bottle of 2011 Laurent Reverdy Sancerre that I recently bought at Trader Joe’s ($12.99) to drink with the clam soup.  Suzette and I both agreed that the Sancerre lacked character and the normal zip of citrus and minerality of Sancerre.  It was like drinking dead wine with no character or interesting flavor. Alas, there are some bad Sancerres.  I guess you must pay to get the good stuff sometimes.  One of my rules about buying wine is that sometimes you can buy a good cheap wine, but the price to be paid for that wonderful experience is that sometimes you have to drink some bad wines.  We use the really bad wine for cooking so it is not a total loss.  The Laurant Reverdy Sancerre is a step above a bad wine.  It is a cleanly made but unexciting wine, so it is a  candidate for something like a kir; the addition of some sweet liquor to an inoffensive wine without character or flavor that adds flavor to the wine and makes it interesting enough to drink.  It will never had character, but it with the addition of some interestng flavoring liquor it will be drinkable. 
    
After dinner we heated and ate the wedge of pecan pie that Cynthia Elliott and Ricardo Guillermo had brought on Tuesday evening with scoops of chocolate ice cream.

Later in the evening during and after watching “Moneyball” we made another celeriac, Hubbard Squash and potato casserole.  I chopped and boiled two russet potatoes, the last ½ of celery root.  Then Suzette creamed them with cream and butter and added the plain roasted PPI squash flesh and put that mixture in a pyrex baking dish and garnished it with pinion nuts and Pecorino Romano cheese she had pulverized in the Cuisinart.

Bon Appètit