Linguine with meatballs

I was so horrified by the Il Mulino debacle that my mind turned yesterday to Italian food. Not to real italian food, but to the Americanized version - even that, I thought, could be done much better than what I had seen at that unfortunate restaurant. Strolling around the Union Square Greenmarket on early Saturday morning, I found some fresh, young garlic, complete with bulb, some wonderful onions, bright red fragrant tomatoes, and good basil. Stopping later at Grand Central Station's in-house butcher, Cierello, I picked up some hot Italian sausage, and went home. The agenda for today would be the stodgiest of America-Italian comfort food; linguine with meatballs (yea, yea, so I prefer wider noodles to spaghetti- so sue me).

The first order of business in any kind of sauce like this is to prepare the meat. In this case, I tore the sausages out of their casings, and mixed them with basil chopped chiffonade, finely diced summer garlic, and freshly ground black pepper. You don't need to add too many more flavorings, I think, to sausage meatballs - the butcher has already done much of the the work. The other thing to remember, which of course I momentarily forgot, is that you need to be careful about the proportion of meat to other ingredients. Since you're going to be frying the meatballs, adding too much basil and garlic will cause those ingredients to burn in the hot fire of the pan - you can withstand some of that, but not too much. In any case, roll the mixture into small uneven balls - to me, too much perfection in shaping this kind of thing takes away the home-made rusticity of the dish- and fry them in extremely hot oil until crusty and brown on the outside. The way I make meatballs, they won't be done yet. That's fine - just pull them out of the frying pan, and dry them on generous swathes of kitchen paper on a plate. They'll come back into the game later.

Using the same oil, and hopefully some melted fat from the sausages, very slowly sweat some finely minced onions and garlic. It's key to sweat, that is to sautee at low heat, rather than fry - you don't want any coloring of the onions and garlic, and you want them to go soft. As far as I'm concerned, there's not supposed to be any crisp onion texture in the finished sauce. While that's happening, and it should take a good ten minutes, chop the tomatoes. As you can see from the picture on Waddling Thunder, the tomatoes should be reduced to a pulp - they way I do it is to chop them into squares, and then rake them back and forth with two large chef's knives, occasionally grinding them into the cutting board like one does garlic. By the time you finish the tomatoes (that bowl represents four carefully mashed fruits)the pseudo-sofrito (the traditional italian trio includes celery) should be ready. Add the tomatoes to the pan, water or red wine, and the meatballs. Let the mixture bubble away happily for some twenty minutes, adding some red chili flakes if you happen to like the sauce spicier than it would be from just leaching the sausage's heat. At some point before it finishes, remember to boil some salted water, and add the pasta - there's no reason to wait to cook the pasta later.

When you're ready to finish the dish, be sure to undercook the pasta slightly - as it's described in so many cookbooks, the pasta should still haev some "bite". Tip some of the sauce, without meatballs, into another pan on medium heat, add a ladlefull of pasta water, and then add the al dente noodles to the mix. Toss the contents of the pan aggressively, making sure to dress the pasta lightly rather than drowning it. The extra water will let the noodles cook to done in the pan. Remove the pasta to a bowl, add three meatballs per person, and sprinkle parmesan and more chiffonade basil over the whole creation. Eat quickly - preferably with some red wine, and if you're feeling decadent, with a bageutte stuffed horribly with butter and more garlic.