Christina Cooks: Back to the Cutting Board

Sophia Loren famously said, "Everything you see I owe to spaghetti."

I don't know about you, but if she looks like what pasta can do for our looks, I am in.

Pasta's warm, comforting, sexy, and yummy, so maybe our Sophia is right.

Let me show you why there's never enough pasta today on Christina Cooks.

(upbeat theme music) (announcer) Underwriting for Christina Cooks is provided by Suzanne's Specialties, offering a full line of alternative vegan and organic sweeteners and toppings.

Suzanne's Specialties.

Sweetness the way Mother Nature intended.

Jonathan's Spoons, individually handcrafted from cherry wood, each designed with your hand and purpose in mind.

Additional funding is also provided by: Hi, I'm Christina Pirello, and this is Christina Cooks, where each week we take fresh, seasonal ingredients and whip them into amazing dishes.

Will they all be plant-based?

Yes.

Will they all be delicious?

Yes.

I don't know about you, but in my house, there's never enough pasta.

I know, we have this whole anti-carb movement happening, but let me just tell you something, look at Sophia Loren and Anna Magnani and Claudia Cardinale, and you're gonna go grab yourself a bowl of pasta.

We're gonna make three pasta dishes today, all simple, all easy, all healthy, and we're gonna start with a pesto, but not the way you think.

These are some fresh shelled peas, so they're not gonna cook for very long.

We're gonna take about a cup and a half of those peas.

Or more, I don't know.

Carefully measure.

When it comes to eating pasta, the one thing that Italians do right-- well, they do a lot of things right, but the one thing they really do right is they cook their pasta al dente.

"Al dente" means "to the tooth."

When you cook your pasta al dente, it's not an insulin trigger, so you don't go from the pasta to the baked potato to the cookie to the macaroni and cheese back to the pasta, back to the cookie, back to the bread.

You eat pasta, you're seriously happy, and you move on to the rest of your day.

Italians also walk a lot, and so walking helps you to move those carbohydrates through your system.

The body needs carbohydrates, so why not make carbohydrates that are fun like, you know, pasta.

So, you want to cook the peas just until they're bright green, because these are fresh.

And yes, you can use frozen peas, of course.

Just be careful when you use frozen peas that they're not too mushy, or as we say in Italian "mushade," which is like not so nice.

So we're gonna take them right from the hot water right into a food processor.

Now, this is a pesto I always make in a food processor.

Very often, my typical sort of classic basil pesto I make by hand.

Chop the basil, chop all the stuff, but it's really hard to chop peas, they're slippery little suckers, so I use a food processor.

I'm gonna get them all out.

And yeah, they're hot, but they're a nice bright green color, and once I add the rest of my ingredients, they will be amazing in this pesto.

Okay.

So the next thing we're gonna add are some walnut pieces.

Instead of pine nuts, we're gonna use walnuts.

So, about, I don't know, a third of a cup, half of a cup?

I don't know.

Something like that.

Kind of use your eyeball, you want a nice, rich pesto.

Then we're gonna take-- my favorite kitchen hack-- a frozen lemon.

Keep a lemon in your freezer at all times, because when a recipe calls for zest and juice, you just take and grate right through the lemon zest, right through the pith, right into the flesh, and you get amazing lemon flavor, amazing lemon perfume, and, oh, and your lemons never go bad on the kitchen counter!

Because they're in the freezer.

I love this.

This is one of my favorite things that I've started using.

Of course, I learned it on the Amalfi Coast where the lemons are lemons from heaven.

So, you know, you have to kind of take that into account.

So that goes in.

The next thing to go in is white miso.

And white miso is gonna serve as our Parmigiano flavor, 'cause white miso has a lovely, cheesy flavor.

Now, normally in pesto, there's garlic, but this is a sweet pea pesto, so garlic's gonna take away from that flavor, so I'm not using it.

But if you want to, you can.

Next, we'll add about a quarter cup of olive oil, extra virgin.

Please use good oil.

Don't even waste your time cooking with olive oil if it's not the good stuff.

If you're buying a vat in a big-box store for like $1, that's not good olive oil.

Really good olive oil can be cooked to high heat, has all the heart healthy polyphenols you could possibly want, and antioxidants.

Sorry about the noise.

We're gonna pulse this until it's creamy.

And rich and gorgeous and bright green.

Look at this color, I mean, just look at this color!

This is the greatest pesto next to basil pesto, which we might also add.

Should we add some basil to this?

Yeah, what do you think, basil?

Yeah.

So when you cut basil, if you have the whole plant, you want to come down to like, I want to say, a seam.

You know, like where there's a bud growing.

This will prevent your basil, number one, from going to seed and number two, encourage regrowth.

So that's what you want to do.

And in this case, the basil is gonna give us that pesto flavor.

I usually take away any big stems, but this is really tender, fresh basil, and I put it in whole.

I don't bother with chopping or messing around with it in any way.

And it'll get blended in.

I don't like to blend the basil too, too much like in the beginning.

I kind of want it to come in later so it doesn't get too bruised.

Then we'll go in, move it around.

Oh, my goodness, this smells so good.

I gotta tell you, I love to cook pasta.

I like to cook a lot of things, but I love cooking pasta.

Any kind.

Okay, so there is our pesto.

And now what I did was I cooked, in this case, fusilli.

When it comes to this particular-- like a lightish pesto, what you want to do is use a pasta that's curly so that the pesto gets in all the little crevices and all the little creases.

Now, if I lived in the North of Italy, the pesto would stay beautifully positioned in the center, but my family is from the South where it's gravy, not sauce.

So, we stir this in, and the pesto will sort of open up through the pasta, because the pasta is warm and it will sort of melt.

And you just keep tossing until it's well coated and well throughout.

You might need more pesto, you might not.

And you just keep mixing, be patient.

You know, cooking is not a sprint, cooking is a marathon.

So take your time, respect your ingredients, nurture it along, enjoy it.

And then just let it be coated with this gorgeous pesto, and you have one of the most amazing, fresh-tasting pestos you will ever taste.

And up next, yup, a vegan version of Cacio e Pepe.

-Can a vegetable be a fruit?

-A fruit can be a vegetable.

(boy) What?

It can be both?

(girl) What happens if you swallow the seeds?

(unintelligible) -I don't get it.

-I am so confused.

Living a healthy lifestyle can be confusing, it can be confounding.

There's so much information out there, some of it's real, some of it's not real, some of it's just stuff.

So in these segments, I've invited a combination of experts who can help to clear things up and people who might have questions that I might be able to help clear up.

So today, I'm with Todd Nappolitano who is sort of my own personal science nerd, although you do work in the science industry.

Tell me again your official title?

I'm the Director of Business Development for Key Initiatives for Merieux NutriSciences, so I'm involved in a lot of the sort of progressive food trends, -health sciences.

-Right.

So, I decided to have Todd come here today and talk to me about what's happening.

Like starting in spring of 2020 when the pandemic started, fast forward through that year, because what I saw was this massive uptick in fast food eating, and I'm wondering like where that-- what you saw happen from your perspective.

You know, it's a time of great dichotomy for me, that's really how I look at it.

So for example, there was increased awareness with health.

There were people working out from home in greater numbers than ever before.

Yeah, you can't even get equipment now.

-Right.

-Exactly, and home cooking really exploded, so there was a greater awareness, and at the same time, it was a time of great dichotomy.

You had a pandemic with-- there was a mortality rate associated with it, alcohol consumption was up, and fast food consumption, you're exactly right, exploded, and all of the calories, fat, sodium, sugar that goes with it began to become the mainstay of everyday life.

(Christina) And so do you think that was just-- I know a lot of people couched it in support of local restaurants, but was it just comfort, was it just hopelessness, in a way?

(Todd) Well, again, it was a time of great dichotomy, so 110,000 restaurants closed.

-In the country.

-Yes.

Now, you know that there's a lot of turnover in that industry, but what died with it were all of the new trends for progressive eating that were just beginning to arise.

-You're right!

-And they were snuffed out -and we have to restart.

-Yeah.

(Todd) But what survived-- again, it's a dichotomy-- are the big-box franchise restaurants.

-Right.

-For example-- (Christina) Because they had the cushion, they had the money to spend.

(Todd) They're opening hundreds and hundreds of new restaurants.

They've got the mobile ordering app, so people were eating home, but more and more the home cooked meals being supplanted by the takeaway meal -from a retail franchise.

-So what's the trend you see happening now?

Do you see a change coming?

Are we moving toward healthier?

Because we know the statistic is that more than 70% of Americans were metabolically unfit to fight disease.

I think that's TBD.

I think we need to see the restaurant industry reblossom with progressive food options.

Because the pace at which fast food has overtaken everybody, 70% of the total restaurant spend, $285 billion went to fast food.

They had 83% of restaurant foot traffic.

-It's unbelievable.

-That's unbelievable.

And so you have to now play catch-up.

-Right.

-So when people begin to go out more, when people feel more comfortable moving around, perhaps they return to a greater sense of awareness and the effort it takes to achieve a healthier lifestyle.

At the same time, there's a lot of catch-up to be done.

So when you eat out, think about making better choices and skip the fast food, okay?

If you want to get the best out of me, give me a challenge.

Somebody on Instagram challenged me to come up with a vegan version of Cacio e Pepe, which means "cheese and pepper."

So I had to think about it for a minute.

Not much more than a minute, but a minute.

So I'm gonna show you how I did it, it's a really easy recipe, but first I want you to take a look over here at this pasta cooking.

You're thinking to yourself, there's hardly any water in there!

This is how you cook pasta.

You don't cook pasta in a gigantic pot like a swimming pool, because then, you know what your pasta tastes like?

Water.

This pasta will taste like, you know, pasta.

So let's start with the pepe part of the Cacio e Pepe.

I'll be the first one to tell you that-- not a fan of black pepper.

Not a fan of black pepper until I created this dish!

I discovered, if you toast black peppercorns, they're really yummy!

So you want to toast 'em for this dish to get the moisture out, number one, and number two, you intensify the flavor and also kind of smooth out the rough edges.

So you just want to toast it until you can smell it.

If it makes you start to sneeze, you've toasted it too long.

Then, you can either smash it with a skillet, put it in a coffee grinder, or dump it into a spice grinder, anything like that to grind it.

You want to grind it really finely.

Do you have to do this step?

Do you have to toast your black peppercorns?

Yeah, you do.

So we're gonna grind those.

I love this thing.

This is like my grandmother's old grinder.

It's the greatest thing in the world.

Okay, so we're gonna set the pepper aside, now we're gonna work on the sauce part.

We're gonna take some extra virgin olive oil.

A generous amount, right?

This is your sauce.

This and the pasta water is what's going to help to make this thing creamy, but you have to give it some texture.

And the way I decided to do that was take some toasted hazelnuts and chop them, but you need to chop them pretty finely.

(crunching) Like they kind of need to be almost like-- not quite a flour, but you don't want any big chunks.

You don't want the nuts to be identifiable.

This is almost like the breadcrumb kind of texture that you're looking for here that would come from grated cheese.

That's the texture I'm going for, and I managed to get it with nuts.

So we're gonna chop these.

This is also a very good way to develop your knife skills as well.

So when you have a texture about like this.

I'm gonna move those aside, 'cause those are too big.

You can do this as long as you want, 'cause this is what you want, this texture right here.

Then you're gonna take the skillet and you're gonna turn on the heat.

And you're gonna add to it some white miso.

This is gonna give you Parmesan flavor, about two tablespoons.

Some garlic powder to give you flavor.

And then you're going to sort of smoosh this around-- that's a kitchen term, "smoosh."

We're gonna smoosh this to blend the miso with the oil.

And as soon as that starts to happen that you don't have an unhomogenized miso and oil thing happening, you're gonna add your finely chopped nuts.

And get the ones that are really powdery in there.

And then you're gonna cook this around, stirring it until it's really well blended.

This dish is so easy and so quick, and you're wondering where is the pepe in this dish?

Hang on, it's coming.

Once you have this nice sort of amalgamated mixture of nuts, miso, and oil, now you're gonna take tongs and right from your pasta water, including some of the water, because that's really the key to Cacio e Pepe sauce is the pasta water.

(sizzling) And you get that lovely sizzle.

I love this dish.

I love this dish, I love this dish, I love this dish.

You're gonna cook this all together until it's coated with miso and nuts and oil.

You've gotta kinda be a little bit vigorous here to get it to work.

Then--the smell of this dish is so good.

The nuts and the miso and the pasta water give the impression, if you can get in here and see this, of there being cheese in this dish.

So then I usually just take a platter.

This is not really a bowl pasta.

And I mound it in my dish.

By the way, you guys should know, this is a serving for me.

Okay, so we have that.

Then we take... and garnish with pepper.

And there you have the vegan version of Cacio e Pepe.

Olive oil is one of the most versatile ingredients in your kitchen, and you all should have olive oil in your kitchen.

And I know you're thinking, well, yeah, for cooking, but did you know that you can bake with it?

First of all, you should know that it's a monounsaturated fat that's good from the temperature of 375 to about 404 Fahrenheit.

That's a really high-heat oil.

You can saut in it, you can do all those things you know you can do in oil.

But baking with it is amazing.

When I was a kid, my mother was a great baker, and all my grandmother's sisters, she was the youngest of 17.

They didn't have TV in Naples at that time.

Anyway, they all were great bakers, and so I used to bake with corn oil a lot prior to GMO corn happening and StarLink corn and all that stuff.

So now I had to figure out what to bake with, and I didn't really like the flavor of sunflower oil and I didn't like safflower oil or canola.

They were boring, number one, and the impact on the environment from canola and safflower, number two, I couldn't find a really good fat.

So I pulled out my mother's version of a recipe box, and it had--it was a salt water taffy box from Wildwood, New Jersey.

And in it are their idea of recipes, which is "measure the flour with the blue lid, the baking soda with the little red spoon," none of which exists anymore.

But I noticed, throughout all their baking, they used olive oil.

Not butter, olive oil.

And so I asked an aunt of mine, like what's up with the olive oil?

Doesn't your desert taste like salad?

And she said, "Did you ever eat our desserts?"

"Yeah."

"Are they good?"

"Yeah."

So she said, "In the South of Italy, we didn't use a lot of butter, it's too hot.

We used our olive oil."

So what they did was they would bake, and so I started baking with olive oil.

And what I noticed is the crumb is amazing.

When you use olive oil in your baking, the cake is tender and has this amazing crumb.

Look at the moisture in that cake.

It's just brilliant.

And when you eat it, you're not getting any olive oil flavor.

In this case, just really rich chocolate.

So when you're baking, don't be afraid to take that great bottle of olive oil out of the pantry and use it in place of butter or any other fat in your baking, 'cause I'm telling ya, you won't regret it.

Not for a second.

Just so good, and the crumb is moist.

You can't lose with this.

Go with olive oil in your baking.

Okay, so this next pasta dish is a favorite in my house.

My Sicilian husband loves this dish.

It's a little bit of work, it's a little more work than a typical pesto, because you have to take cherry tomatoes, cut a little cross in the bottom of each tomato, and dump it into boiling salted water like this.

And you're gonna cook them for about two minutes.

And then when they're cool enough to handle, yup, you're gonna peel all the little skins off the tomatoes so that you have a bowl of tomatoes like this.

And what that does is it's gonna give me a nice smooth, creamy pesto.

If you leave the skins on, which I guess you can, it's kind of like lazy man's pesto, although pesto is not a lot of work anyway, it's gonna give you a texture that has the skins of the tomato in there, which is probably not a nice mouth feel, but again, it's your call.

So we're gonna start our pesto with our skinned, cooled cherry tomatoes.

Try not to get a ton of the water in here, but you're gonna get some.

So that goes in.

And then it's blanched almonds.

I'm using blanched slivered almonds, you can use whole ones, doesn't matter.

They go in.

Some whole garlic cloves.

This is kind of a sweet pesto, but you need a little hit of garlic, so I'm gonna use four cloves.

It's a good bit.

Miso to give us Parmigiano flavor, about two tablespoons, some fresh basil.

Remember when you work with basil, we've talked about this before, you want to cut your basil down by sort of like a seam, right?

So that the basil has a chance to regrow and reseed itself so it doesn't all just grow into those little white flowers that are the basil going to seed.

My basil plants, by the end of summer, look like they've been savaged by something.

That's gonna go right in.

We're gonna use some extra virgin olive oil.

With this particular pesto, I tend to be a little more generous with oil because it kind of needs it so it doesn't become watery from the tomatoes.

So that's a good quarter cup.

The top goes on, a little noise.

(pulsing) And this is sort of more of like a beige pesto.

It's so nice.

It's got such a nice flavor, it's kind of sweet and spicy and sour and, you know.

You could add hot spice to this, a little hot pepper.

But I kind of like to make it more classic.

So then we're gonna take our pasta.

In this case, we use gemelli.

Gemelli is a twisted pasta, that means the "twin," so we kind of did that, because you need a pasta that the pesto can stick to.

And you can see it's a very loose-- almost like a sauce more than a pesto.

And what you don't use on your pasta, it's really nice to dip your bread in.

And then we're just gonna take a spoon, toss.

It's really easy to coat the pasta with this.

It's a lovely dish.

I love to serve this in a white bowl, because it just looks so elegant.

Pile it up.

You have little bits of green from the fresh basil.

The smell is amazing.

And there you have-- it's actually called macaroni with Sicilian pesto, and for those of you who grew up in either South Philly, New Jersey, New York, anywhere in the Northeast, not New England, like the Mid-Atlantic states calling it gravy not sauce called it macaroni and not pasta.

So this is macaroni with Sicilian pesto, and it's easy and delicious and a wonderful main course.

What are you waiting for?

Let's get back to the cutting board, and I'll see you next time on Christina Cooks: The Macroterranean Way.

(announcer) Underwriting for Christina Cooks is provided by Suzanne's Specialties, offering a full line of alternative vegan and organic sweeteners and toppings.

Suzanne's Specialties.

Sweetness the way Mother Nature intended.

Jonathan's Spoons, individually handcrafted from cherry wood, each designed with your hand and purpose in mind.

Additional funding is also provided by: You can find today's recipes and learn more by visiting our website at: And by following Christina on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.

The companion cookbook, "The Macroterranean Way," combines the Mediterranean diet with the ancient wisdom of Chinese medicine, allowing us to understand how food affects us so we can cook deliciously while creating the wellness we want.

To order your copy for $14.95 plus handling, call: Add "Back to the Cutting Board" and Christina's iconic "Cooking the Whole Foods Way," and get all three books for $49.95 plus handling, call: