sunday supper: return of pasta week

I'm back! I know I promised pics of all the delicious foods we were cooking and consuming over our family vacation, but...I didn't take any pictures. I'm lame, I know, but I couldn't remember where I stashed my camera until the last day when I was packing stuff up and found it underneath the giant bag of yarn I brought to work on my ripple afghan. Which I barely worked on. Oh well. We did eat and cook really well every evening, and everyone had their great contributions. Gene and I only made fresh pasta once, but it was fantastic. We had vastly different results when we each made separate batches of dough, yet when we cut and cooked it all together we couldn't tell the difference. Good pasta is good pasta I guess.



Speaking of good pasta, now I'm back and I've fallen right into the pasta trap. Sunday night's first course was an incredible pasta sauce from Marcella Hazan's Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, Spaghetti with a Smothered Onion Sauce. This sauce is simply awesome. You would never believe how flavorful something that consists only of onions could be. This is going down as one of my very favorites.

Onions that start out looking like this:


Eventually turn into this:


Then seem to disappear when tossed with the pasta:


You may not be able to see it, but you can definitely taste it. I won't post the specific recipe since this is copyrighted in the book, but if you don't already own that book and love to cook, get thee to a bookstore immediately. It is a must-own and perhaps one of the best cookbooks ever written.