My mom can cook. I suppose almost everyone thinks their mom’s food is the best they’ve ever had, but seriously, aside from the occasional burnt toast or overcooked bacon, my mom can cook. (So can my dad, for that matter.)
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Señor Habanero and I got to taste the fruit of her talents last weekend, at a dinner celebrating Dad being Dad. Mom – a.k.a. Mama Cherry Pepper – displayed her usual impeccable taste in fashioning the evening’s menu: rigatoni with caprese lobster salad, followed by raspberry sorbet garnished with a freshly baked brown-edged honey wafer cookie. The clean, fresh flavors and simplicity of the ingredients were a gentle nod to summer’s arrival.
The salad, which consisted of chopped fresh tomatoes, basil, mozarella bocconcini, extra virgin olive oil, and freshly cooked lobster, was prepared hours in advance, allowing the flavors to coalesce. Shortly before dinner was to be served, Mama Cherry Pepper cooked up the rigatoni in the leftover lobster water – something which did wonders for otherwise mundane pasta – then finished cooking it in olive oil that had been seasoned with garlic. The result? A subtly decadent yet unpretentious dinner that satisfied all Peppers present. (It would have been even more wonderful paired with a prosecco, but alas, there was none to be had.)
The rigatoni with caprese lobster salad recipe was Fortunato Nicotra’s 2007 response to Pamela Sherrid’s summer pasta salad (1996). Nicotra, who is executive chef at Felidia and a true Italian, was “horrified by the idea of such a dish” – but once his horror subsided, he went ahead and created his own updated spin on the recipe, most notably bringing the salad and the pasta together just before it’s served.
As for the brown-edged honey wafer cookie… that’s Mama Cherry Pepper’s secret recipe.
Do you have a favorite summertime recipe? Share it with us!
