My Last Meal!!! (Molise)

One of the recipes that kept coming up while researching and looking in my cookbooks for Molise was capanata. Instead of using one of the many recipes I found for it, I asked my grandma to teach me her recipe (which was all just in her head), because she makes the best capanata in the world.

We started by cutting the eggplants into little cubes and frying them in oil. I learned that you need to continuously stir them, or they will burn.

Once the eggplant was done we set it aside and cooked the celery with tomato sauce and garlic. We turned the heat down and let it simmer for about ten minutes, so that the celery was still a little crunchy.

We mixed some sugar with white wine vinegar (my grandma would have preferred red wine vinegar but it was the only kind we didn't have) and put it in the microwave for about 10 seconds, just so that the sugar dissolved. We added this to the pan, along with the eggplant, capers and pine nuts.

The next step of the meal was to make the pasta. I was very excited to make this pasta because I found special "pasta flour" at Wegmans that is a mixture of durum wheat and semolina.

To form the cavatelli, which is a typical pasta of Molise, I rolled out ropes about the same diameter as a pencil. I then cut the ropes into cylinders that were a little less than an inch long.

I then placed my fingers on the cylinders and pulled the dough towards myself to make it curl up. This was the most challenging pasta shape I have made so far, which is funny because the book says it is simple and even children can make it. Luckily it isn't crucial for it to be perfect like with the tortellini. The dough was also very sticky, so I had to repeatedly flour my hands and the work surface throughout.

To make the bread crumbs I grated day old bread and toasted it with oil and garlic in a pan.

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I then boiled the pasta and cauliflower together, added the pasta a little later so they were done at the same time.

I put everything in a bowl with some chopped almonds and parsley, and it was delicious!

I had hoped to make some sort of desert from Molise, but every desert recipe involved baking and it was 90 degrees outside, and about 85 degrees in my kitchen the day I cooked from Molise so I decided not to.