to explain again, I didn’t cook this meal; I just assembled it

Because it was on what some folks call ‘Holy Saturday’ (as a child, a choir boy, and an altar boy, I was one of them), and it was the second day of the ‘Paschal fast’, the meal we enjoyed last night would have been much in line with Catholic tradition.

But that’s not why we had it.

Also, I didn’t actually cook the meal; I just assembled it.

It was an evening that would straddle Friday’s fish and a Sunday steak. I knew pasta would make sense, and then I realized that I had time to check out what Luca Donofrio had in his fresh pasta shop inside Eataly that day. There I spotted his ravioli filled with ricotta, lemon zest, nutmeg, marjoram, and mascarpone, and it both looked and sounded terrific; also, it obviously wouldn’t demand a complex sauce.

Once I had brought some home I decided that meant butter, a smidgen of green scallion stem, a bit of aromatic heatless pepper, salt, and black pepper. I wasn’t sure how I would finish the dish until almost the moment it had been placed in the bowls, when I decided I could not not use the red amaranth I had, if only because nothing else would look so spectacular on top of the pasta.

  • several tablespoons of Kerrygold Pure Irish Butter heated slowly inside a large high-sided tin-lined heavy copper pan with a very small amount of sliced green parts of scallions from Norwich Meadows Farm, a crushed piece of orange-gold habanada pepper, and a bit of sea salt and freshly-ground Tellicherry pepper, then 12 ounces of a fresh ricotta-lemon zest-nutmeg-marjoram-mascarpone-filled ravioli from Eataly, which had just been boiled inside a large pot of well-salted water for 2 minutes and drained, slipped into the copper pan and mixed well with the sauce, everything stirred together over a low flame, arranged inside 2 shallow bowls, some micro red amaranth from Windfall Farms arranged on top

Just before the pasta there had been an antipasto, as there was a little bresaola left from the meal we shared with friends on Wednesday.

  • a couple ounces of an Uruguayan bresaola from Eataly, arranged on plates with sprigs of slightly-flowering arugula from Bodhitree Farm, both meat and green drizzled with a good Puglian olive oil (Alce Nero biologico DOP ‘Terra di Bari Bitonto) from Eataly and some of the juice of a large local lemon from Fantastic Gardens of Long Island, the greens seasoned with Maldon salt and freshly-ground Tellicherry pepper
  • slices of an Eric Kayser ‘baguette monge’