Growing up Catholic in the 50s and 60s (and don’t be a smart aleck; I mean the 1950s and 1960s) meant abstaining from meat on Fridays. And growing up in the land-locked cattle-heavy Nebraska plains meant tuna casseroles or fish sticks on Fridays.
I would assume that times and tastes and grocery stores have changed since then, even in Nebraska. I can probably buy shrimp, for example, as easily there as I can here in Denver. I can likely even find fresh fish if I look a bit. But back in the good ol’ days, we ate our fish out of a can or as breaded sticks, and eagerly awaited our Saturday morning breakfast of bacon and eggs as a reward for our penance.
Nowadays, at least for me, not eating meat on Fridays is not only easy to do, but quite enjoyable. It really doesn’t feel like much of a sacrifice. I don’t know that my husband would feel quite the same way, although he enjoys most shellfish and really likes almost all kinds of pasta dishes. And though he would always prefer Italian sausage on his pizza, he wouldn’t turn his nose up at a simple cheese pizza. Hold the vegetables for him, however.
As I paged through the newest cookbook from my very favorite chef and cookbook author Lidia Bastianich, I discovered that an extraordinary number of her recipes, especially her pasta recipes, are meatless. I assume that is because in Italy, they take advantage of the wonderful cheeses and the fresh seasonal vegetables to produce the most delicious and mostly simple sauces for pasta. Two of them caught my eye.
The first is Baked Penne and Mushrooms. To enjoy this recipe, you must like mushrooms. But the earthiness of a variety of mushrooms is kept in check by the richness of the cream and butter that is added to the mix. Topped with rich fontina cheese and baked until that cheese is brown and crusty makes a meal that even someone reluctant to try mushrooms would have to like, especially on a meatless Friday.
The second recipe that made my mouth water is Maccheroni with Fresh Lemon and Cream Sauce. Her recipe explains how to make maccheroni using a complicated contraption known as a chitarra, which resembles a guitar. The strings are used to cut the pasta into long strands. My recommendation would be to use dried linguini or spaghetti, but far be it from me to dissuade you from being creative. On her television show, she even demonstrated how you could cut the pasta by hand. Seemed like a lot of work to me.
I’m not normally drawn to pasta sauces that have cream or half and half as an ingredient, but the cream in this sauce is offset by a hearty amount of lemon and lemon zest, which would take away some of the richness that I would find a bit off putting for a pasta sauce.
The first recipe requires a stint in the oven, so you have to account for that time. The second, however, is so quick that you can throw the sauce together in the time it takes to cook your pasta (particularly if you are using a dry pasta as opposed to a fresh pasta; dry pasta takes a few minutes longer to cook).
The best news about both of these dishes is that they would be relatively inexpensive. If you don’t want to pay the price for fancier mushrooms, simply substitute the less pricey and more familiar button mushrooms. Heavy cream can be somewhat expensive, but you can substitute half-and-half if you want. It won’t be quite as rich, but that’s not always a bad thing.
Unfortunately, true fontina cheese is expensive. I would think you could substitute another kind of cheese that melts easily, such as Swiss or even Monterey Jack. If it’s up to me, however, I would fork out the cash for fontina if you can find it. After all, you aren’t paying for meat. And you could easily substitute Parmesan cheese for the pecorino cheese called for in the lemony sauce.
Meatless Fridays aren’t too tough anymore. Perhaps I should consider a meatless meal every week, even when a man in Italy wearing a pointed hat isn’t telling me to do so.
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