Frugality in an Italian Kitchen

I talked to Italian foodie Matt Wade of Pasta Recipes Made Easy about the frugality of the Italian kitchen and the lessons he has learned from his mamma-in-law Marisa.

Frugal Lessons from an Italian Kitchen

Very much so, much more than Brits like me in my experience. Generally speaking, Italian cuisine developed from peasant food; it was all about people using fresh local produce and really not letting anything go to waste. And Marisa still cooks and lives very much with that ethos in mind.

Take pasta sauces for example; while pasta itself is largely a unifying national foodstuff, its coverings are often very region-specific. For instance, in the North of Italy where it is significantly colder in Winter, you'll come across heavier, chunkier, cheesier sauces than you will in the South where fresh, light tomato sauces, summery vegetables and Arabia-inspired chili sauces are more common. I traveled to Sicily last summer for the first time, and they love their chili there. Sicily has been ruled by all manner of peoples in the past, and it really has a noticeable Arabic/Eastern influence.

They do a little, but I'd say actually that in terms of not wanting to waste extra portions and leftovers, probably even more freezing than canning.

When we hit our local farmer's market for example, we'll buy sun-dried tomatoes, which we'll throw in that day's lunch salad. Then my wife will can the rest by dropping them in extra virgin olive oil and really squeezing them down into jars using a pestle and a bunch of elbow grease.

Of course we also use jars for storing any dried packet pasta we've bought. We have a set of different-sized jars for this, and display-wise it works a treat. It really screams 'you're entering an Italian kitchen!'.

So what do you most commonly freeze? Sauces? Fresh pasta?

Whilst some pasta sauces don't really suit freezing, lasagna certainly does. Since it's quite labor-intensive to make, we prefer to make double each time. Then we cook the spare lasagna with the one we're going to eat, then freeze it, then reheat next time. Although you can just as easily freeze it once it is prepared, without pre-cooking.

We also make a lot of fresh pesto - including my new fave red pepper and walnut pesto - and this is very freezable; we keep it in there anything up to 3 months. In fact considering it takes a little preparation, it seems more sensible to make a big batch each time, as the time is virtually the same as for a small one.

As for fresh pasta, it's possible to freeze or simply refrigerate this once you've worked it into a dough ball ready for rolling out flat next time. However it's always a bit trickier to roll so in truth I don't do this that much. I tend to follow Marisa's approach and make it fresh when required. Not every time, as you don't always have the extra 15 minutes, but when possible - as the difference it taste it really worth it.

You mentioned using leftovers. I always seem to cook too much and have lots of leftovers. I then have to get creative! How creative are Marisa and your wife Laura with the food that's not eaten first time around?

This, for me, is where Italians really shine. Marisa is super-creative with leftovers, without even really trying it seems to me. Say for instance she has a leftover portion of pasta, which has already been mixed through with its sauce. Not to worry. Obviously you can pop it in Tupperware and in the fridge for lunch tomorrow (just add a little water and reheat in the microwave or in a pan), or else - even better - next mealtime Marisa will mix this pasta through with an eggy omelette mix and fry it on each side to make a pasta frittata. Diet-friendly it ain't, but tasty? Very much so!

(Sharon's note.... I'm remembering this one! Need to remember the name pasta frittata too! Pasta Fritatta sounds so much better than leftovers!)

Marisa's real skill from this point of view, of course, is having the knowledge you can only really get from a lifetime of cooking, which is to say she understands so well which ingredients work with each other that she can just look into what most of us might consider a near-empty fridge and cook up something new.

With Italian pasta, you don't need lots of ingredients to make a nice dish... spaghetti with chili and garlic is one such example. Or my favorite - and the first dish Marisa taught me - something I call 'breakfast pasta'. This is simply tagliatelle mixed through with melted butter and little chunks of medium cheese, served up with a fried egg on top. (If only I'd known that dish at college, I'd have eaten little else!).

In terms of slow-cooked Italian pasta dishes, like the ragu recipe on your site, are these equally waste-free?

Absolutely. In fact the great thing about a dish like ragu is that it effectively produces two courses worth of food. Its big chunk of beef or pork is only really used to flavor the sauce; sure, a little meat will collapse into the sauce as it bubbles away, but generally speaking you end the afternoon (it takes a while) with one of the most scrumptious Italian sauces around, plus a joint of cooked meat that makes a great main course.

In other words, your first course - 'primo piatto' is pasta in ragu sauce, then the main second course can be the sliced meat with the remaining ragu sauce drizzled over the top and a few fresh vegetables alongside. When I'm visiting Genoa we eat that a lot and I never get tired of it!

Sounds delicious! Any final tips?

Yes, just one. It won't save your readers a great deal of cash (because packet pasta is very cheap), but I still really urge them to try making their own fresh pasta from scratch. They can check out my Fresh Pasta Recipe Collection and there they will find that the process is really not difficult at all, and the advantages are great: the pasta produced is tastier itself and it really holds pasta sauces better than the machine-produced packet stuff can.

Thanks for your time Matt.

You're very welcome - buon appetito!