Start of Summer at Neerob & Honoring Sal - #WFPB style.

Sal, Salvatore Falzetta ("Mr. Hairstyling from Italy"), was the man of the hour yesterday at our small celebratory #WFPB (Whole Foods, Plant-Based) dinner, to celebrate the start of summer but also to honor Sal, who is the most famous barber in the neighborhood. He now practices at Silver Star Salon at 1470 Unionport Avenue, around the corner from Neerob Restaurant, where we had our dinner.

This was a recent picture of Sal, reading the paper between clients at Silver Star. Sal started cutting my hair fourteen years ago, and upon listening to my lengthy explanation of how I wanted it, including hand gestures, he rolled his eyes, and said: "I got it. Notta too long, notta too short." That was the one and only time we talked about hair.

Our dinner on June 21st was a proper Italian dinner with a small Bangladeshi flourish.

The appetizer was Capellini Pesto, with Rogier's Green Pasta Sauce, as per the recipe I recently posted here, and followed by a Spaghetti alla Puttanesca, along with a wonderful Arugula salad and Mixed Vegetables (Broccoli and carrots) as well as a Dal with spinach, and some whole wheat naan bread. Naturally, for the appetizer we used whole wheat angel hair pasta (Ronzoni), and for the main course we used Luigi Vitelli Whole Wheat Pasta. Desert was fresh strawberries with a drizzle of a 50/50 mix of Balsamic glaze and Balsamic vinegar.

As a practical matter, for the Puttanesca sauce, I used this Kelp this time instead of the hijiki and wakame that are listed in the recipe, which also worked just fine. I soaked it and cut it up, and, along with the capers and the kalamata olives, it provides all the flavoring that anchovies otherwise would in a traditional style recipe. 

The whole project was a collaboration with Neerob Restaurant, I cooked the Pesto Sauce, and Red Sauce - and the Restaurant, made the salads, the vegetable sides and the dal, and put the whole thing together.

One of Sal's loyal clients, my friend Ed Kremer, presented Sal with a Honor Certificate to celebrate his achievements. Sal came to the USA from Italy in 1958, form Cosenza, Reggio Calabria, and he's been a barber in the Starling Avenue neighborhood for 50 years. (The certificate said 1963 by mistake, but it was 1958).

We had mostly clients of Sal, and a few of my friends from other parts of town, and the result was a wonderful mix of people, and lots of interesting discussions.

Rogier's Green Pasta Recipe

Luigi Nanni died in April 1998, which probably means nothing to you, but Nanni was the proprietor of Restaurant Nanni, on East 46th, corner Lexington Avenue, and given I worked in Greenwich in the 80's it was one place that was convenient for lunch in the city, coming into Grand Central. Nanni was a center of serious Italian cuisine in the city. The death of Mr. Nanni was certainly an event, written up here by my friend Bryan Miller, who was then the restaurant critic for the New York Times.

One of my favorites was angel hair with pesto sauce. 

After the death of Mr Nanni, it lived on for a while, run by Vittorio, the old maitre d' and the cook, but they did not seem to have a happy partnership and a few years ago it all fell apart.

In any case, ever since I committed to a Whole Foods, Plant-Based diet, one of the biggest challenges was what to do for a pesto sauce. For the longest time, I was resigned to the idea that I would never again have angel hair with pesto sauce. Until one day recently, my #WFPB-friend and associate Enrica Sacca in Queens gave me the idea of making a pesto sauce based on sweet peas. Creativity took over and the result blew me away. It was better than the original. Since then, I've now made it three times and I think I've got the recipe down pat, and I think it will be a house favorite for a long time to come. 

There does seem to be an unwritten law that pesto sauce is served over angel hair, so angel hair is now sold out in my neighborhood. Normally, I buy Luigi Vitelli's Whole Wheat Pasta Capellini, but nobody had that, except one package, so I had to settle for Ronzoni, who apparently are Italian in name only, and don't have an Italian bone in their body and they just call it "thin spaghetti." Another marketing opportunity missed. 

So, here goes. This is simple as can be - about 30 minutes for a delicious home made sauce.

Ingredients

1/4 cup of walnut pieces with some pine nuts

1 15 Oz can of green peas

1 bunch of basil

1 bunch of spinach

5-6 cloves of garlic, minced, or at least sliced thin.

1-2 tbsp nutritional yeast

1 cup water

1 tsp Yondu

Optional: sun-dried tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, and, if you blend in one jalapeño pepper, nobody will notice it, but it will pick the whole thing up a notch, some vegan parmesan

Preparation

In your blender:

- add the 1/4 cup of nuts

- add the basil leaves, washed (sandy!)

- drain the peas and add them on top of the basil

- in a frying pan cook the spinach with the garlic, adding the cup of water with Yondu

- as soon as the spinach is wilted, put the spinach in the blender

- add the cooking water from the spinach.

- puree

Done. 

This quantity is enough for 4 people.

Cook the angel hair - 3 mins.

- The sauce will probably still be too thick, so you can add some cooking water from the pasta to make it more liquid - I use about 1-2 cups of it.

If you want to get fancy, you can cut up some sun-dried tomatoes in small pieces, and add those in the sauce, and I like making it with cherry tomatoes.

At your option, you can add some vegan parmesan.

Finger-licking good. I can't stop eating it.

Obviously, this is a very healthy sauce and you can make a meal out of this, I like it with mushrooms and some vegetable, be it broccoli or zucchini, or steamed carrots go really well because of the color combination: the green pasta, the orange carrots (with some parsley) and the red cherry tomatoes.

P.S. In the interest of science I tried regular angel hair with Pesto Sauce recently, and realized that now I cannot imagine why I ever liked that oily sauce. You just lose your taste for it.