Gordolini

This meal was a collaboration between Milo and me; lately he’s been making dinner on Fridays (with varying amounts of help) and this time around the inspiration came from his coining of the word gordolini. Since gordo is Spanish for fat, it seemed logical to use Spanish flavors in both filling and sauce, so that is what we did.

He’s a champ with the pasta machine, so I chopped up the filling while he made sheets with the dough I had mixed earlier and then rested in the fridge. Nothing fancy: flour, eggs, and water.

The filling was chopped chorizo and mozzarella with some herbes de Provence sprinkled in.

Once the pasta was all rolled out, we cut it into squares and then filled and folded them, dipping fingers in water to seal them up.

The sauce was a pint of our tomatoes, to which I added plenty of garlic and about a cup of the clam liquid from a few meals ago, which was strongly Iberian with chorizo, saffron, and sherry vinegar. It gave the sauce a little something extra, and harmonized nicely with the melty/chewy filling.

It’s really not hard to make this sort of thing, and the results are a world away from the versions one finds in the freezers of even high quality markets. Next time, we’re going to make a quadruple batch, freeze them on cookie sheets, and then vacuum-seal them in one-meal portions for the freezer. Banking culinary labor for future weeknight ease: that’s what rainy Sundays are all about.