"ragu" news and stories

I'm not Italian, but I'm lucky to have more than a few Italian-Americans in my life, most of them with roots in southern Italy and Sicily. And one of the best things they've shared with me is the traditional Sunday ragù. It's just as much about family and friends sitting around the table talking and laughing for hours as it is about the sauce that's been simmering on the stove since morning, with the braciole and the pork shoulder and the meatballs. (Oh, and I've been told a thing or two about Sicilian superstitions, like the malocchio, the evil eye, but I'm still not sure how you get rid of the curse. That's for another Sunday conversation.)

My friend and former Gourmet colleague Gina Marie Miraglia-Eriquez makes one of the best ragùs on the planet, and her recipe is one you may want to put in constant rotation. Serve it , as photographer Chez Pim does, above, with pici, a hand-rolled spaghetti-like pasta of flour and water (no egg), that's fat and twisted and has more surface for the sauce to cling to. Mario Batali knows his pici from his penne, and you can find his recipe here. With this combination you'll be set for a world of Sundays.

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The New York Times has a cute occasional video feature called Tiny Kitchen in their online magazine, starring the paper's cook and recipe tester (not a bad job, eh?) Jill Santopietro cooking in her own itty-bitty New York kitchen.

This week Santopietro is making the bizarrely-named but delicious-looking "Eggs in Purgatory" - chestnut polenta with a Southern Italian pork belly ragu and poached eggs, with a bit of ricotta. At barely over seven minutes, the video instructs us on the different cuts of pork, shows us how to make our own chestnut flour and demonstrates good technique for poaching eggs directly in sauce.

All that, with just a handful of pans and a patch of counter space the size of a postage stamp. Previous Tiny Kitchen videos have shown how to cook tangerine sherbet, Roquefort Salad, and homemade spelt crackers. Nice.

Source

This is one of the craziest TV pilots I've ever seen, but I gotta tell ya, I'd rather watch this than half of the shows on the Food Network (especially if they star Rachael Ray or Emeril). Alas, only one episode was made.

It's a wacky cooking show titled Cooking's A Drag, featuring a drag queen named Betty Dee Lishous. It's not all about cooking, of course. She does a little rapport with the audience, there's some music from a studio band, and for some reason, William Shatner shows up to help Betty cook Kentucky Stew! Video after the jump!