Fried Capers and Anchovy Bucatini

Rujira won’t let me buy a mortar and pestle, and yet I keep stumbling on recipes that scream “pound me!” Case in point was this past Saturday. (I swear I’m not purposefully looking for the recipes to make a case.) I drove back from Toronto that same morning and we needed to find something easy, quick and painless for dinner after an exhausting, rainy six-hour drive. That and we only had two more episodes to finish season 2 of Homeland. We needed food, and closure, and we needed it fast.

I stumbled across a recipe for fried capers and anchovy spaghetti on Food and Wine and it seemed right up our alley. Just the right amount of salty. A few tweaks and a happy accident later, we were golden.

 

Our first tweak was to switch noodles from spaghetti to bucatini. We haven’t tried making this pasta at home yet, and I’m not sure how it’d taste fresh. The reason I’m really liking it lately is that it has an enjoyable density to it when you bite down on the dry store-bought stuff. It’s basically spaghetti’s bigger brother.

 

In a flat-bottomed skillet heat 1/3 cup of olive oil until it’s shimmering. Fry about ½ cup of capers, stirring, until they start to shrivel and go brown. This took about 5 minutes. Once there, remove the capers from the heat. Using the same oil, I quickly cooked some diced green onions and about a cup of finely sliced mushrooms. I turned off the heat at this point until I caught up with the other stuff.

Start your pasta now, portioning out enough for four hungry people. 

 

Meanwhile, and if you had a mortar this’d be easier, mix and mash together six anchovy fillets, two garlic cloves, and 1 tablespoon of lemon zest. Mix in another 1/3 cup of olive oil, 2 tablespoons of lemon juice, red-pepper flakes to taste, and ½ cup of finely chopped parsley.

 

Drain the cooked pasta and continue cooking it for a few minutes in the skillet (which you’ve now turned back on to a low-to-medium heat). Add the anchovy paste mix and then the capers. Continue stirring till the pasta is fully coated.

 

While cooking, at this point I felt everything looked a bit too dry. I mistakenly splashed in some red-wine vinegar instead of the olive oil I thought I’d grabbed. Panicking, I proceeded to toss in about a tablespoon of Italian-seasoned breadcrumbs which I fried till the bread turned crispy as it coated the pasta. I’m not sure why I thought this would offset the taste of too much vinegar, but the crispiness of the crumbs actually complemented the taste of the anchovies and capers really well, and so I say, go for it, even with the vinegar. As for Homeland, I’d say stop with season 1 while you’re still ahead.