"What's For Dinner?"

Comfort Food
As I write this, it's early January. The sun is shining today, but more rain is on the way, and we have at least 2 months of cold ahead. No doubt about it, this is a good time of year for long evenings at home which call for simple, satisfying, nourishing suppers.

At our house, we eat a lot of pasta. We'd prefer to go jogging rather than cut out carbohydrates. Our kids could be quite happy with macaroni and cheese out of a box (the natural kind), but over the years we've developed a big repertoire of wonderful pasta meals that everyone likes. Here is one of the simplest and best:

Pasta e Ceci
Rinse 2 cans (or 1 big jar) of chickpeas and remove the skins. Put in a pot with lots of water, cloves of garlic, and sprigs of rosemary from your garden. Cook until quite soft. Remove the rosemary and partially puree with chopped tomatoes (canned plum tomatoes are great). Add water or broth, if necessary, and taste for salt and pepper. Heat to a boil and add shell or elbow pasta, cooking until pasta is al dente. Fine to let sit for awhile. The pasta absorbs some of the liquid. Serve with a thread of olive oil on the top. (This dish is even better if you cook the chickpeas from scratch, but canned, high quality chickpeas are a perfectly acceptable substitute.)

We first enjoyed Pasta e Ceci at a little trattoria in Spoleto, Italy where local tradition included a version with clams. We were staying in Spoleto during the big 1997 earthquake in nearby Assisi. I can't think of a better time to seek out comfort food than during the week of aftershocks.

You may decide you want to linger at the table with a last glass of chianti (or maybe you've moved on to sherry). Have a plate of these lemon cakes handy. They are somewhere between a madeleine and a muffin.

Lemon Cakes
Cream together 1/2c each sugar and butter. Mix in 2 egg yolks, grated rind and juice of 1 lemon, 1 c flour and 1 tsp baking powder. Fold in the 2 egg whites, stiffly beaten. Fill greased mini muffin tins and bake 15 minutes at 350 degrees. Roll or dip in powdered sugar.