Pantry Cooking: Pasta with Oven-Dried Tomatoes, Olives, and Anchovies
I’ll admit, my pantry may not look like most. I’m the kind of person who sees preserved lemons at a good price and buys three jars! Fortunately, I also subscribe to the website Eat Your Books, so now I can enter “preserved lemons” to find things to do with them as I cook my way through my pantry.
To digress before today’s recipe – I would highly recommend Eat Your Books for recipe ideas, especially now. You don’t even have to be a member. One of the pages on this website is a virtual library of online recipes and you can search by ingredient, and then narrow your result by lots of other features, such as course, cuisine, or dietary needs, and you will be directed to a link that includes the full recipe.
If you are a member, you can create your own virtual bookshelf with all the cookbooks you own, and then you can enter an ingredient and it will search your cookbooks for every recipe that uses it. Although the full recipe will not show up, there will be a list of ingredients so you can see if you have what you need.
Today’s recipe was inspired by a recent article in the Washington Post that asked famous chefs for pantry cooking ideas. Padma Lakshmi described what she calls “Paste Pasta” with sun-dried tomato paste, olive paste, and anchovy paste. It so happens I have all three ingredients in the house in the form of the real thing: oven-dried tomatoes in the freezer from last summer’s garden; mixed green and black pitted olives from a dinner party a couple of weeks ago; and a container of salted anchovies in the back of the fridge. I used half of each ingredient to create this pasta (and to have enough for another day with just the two of us), and to top it off, I used sourdough bread crumbs from the freezer.
I know, this may not be my most popular post – many people do not like olives or anchovies. But if you have any of these items in the house, improvise and see how it turns out!
Pasta with Oven-Dried Tomatoes, Olives, and Anchovies
Serves 2, but can easily be doubled
½ cup plain bread crumbs for topping, optional
Olive oil as needed
4 anchovy fillets
¾ cup oven-dried or sun-dried tomatoes, cut in half if large
12 pitted olives, chopped
½ pound long pasta
NB: If you have salted anchovies, use two and rinse under cold water until you can separate each fish into two fillets.
For the optional bread crumbs: Preheat oven to 250°F. Spread the bread crumbs on a foil-lined pan and drizzle with olive oil. Allow to toast in the oven for 10 minutes or until golden. Remove from oven and set aside.
Start a pot of water for the pasta. Warm a small amount of olive oil in a medium skillet over medium heat until shimmering and fragrant. The amount of oil will depend on how much oil there is on the anchovies and tomatoes, so adjust this as needed as you go along. Place anchovies in the pan and allow to sauté until they melt. Sometimes anchovies can splatter in the oil, so cover the pan if you want to minimize this. Once they have mostly melted, add the tomatoes and olives and allow to warm through. Lower heat to keep warm while you cook the pasta.
Salt the boiling water and cook the pasta according to package directions. When the pasta is al dente, turn off the heat, move the pasta pot right next to the skillet, and turn the heat under the skillet back up to medium. Using tongs, carefully move bunches of pasta from the water directly into the skillet. The residual water on the pasta will sizzle, but this is what you want, and will also help get up and bits that stuck to the skillet. Use a heat safe measuring cup to reserve some pasta water. Gently mix the pasta the with anchovies, tomatoes and olives, adding reserved pasta water if necessary to keep it moist. You can also drizzle some olive oil on too if that is your preference.
Divide the pasta between two plates and sprinkle bread crumbs on top. Parmesan is an option.