I invented a one-pot, sweet and spicey pasta dish during the recent winter hibernation.

It’s called Rigatoni dolci e piccanti.

You need a big pot, olive oil, two onions, four cloves of garlic, four red bell peppers, four cups of chicken or vegetable stock (heated or at room temperature), a half-pound of rigatoni and two cups of tomato sauce.

Heat the pot, cover the base with olive oil.

Chop the onions, garlic and peppers, and saute them in the pot. After a couple of minutes, pour in a cup of stock to soften the peppers and onions. Add the tomato sauce. Add salt, pepper, oregano and some crushed red pepper to give it a little kick.

Then add the rigatoni. (Yes! We are cooking the rigatoni right in the sauce!)

Add some stock as needed to soften the pasta, but be careful not to turn this dish into soup.

As the rigatoni cooks, it absorbs the moisture — the sweetness of the peppers, and your spices — and thickens the sauce. Serve hot with some grated parmesan.

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Published by Dan Rodricks

Dan Rodricks is a former long-time columnist for The Baltimore Sun, winner of numerous national and regional journalism awards, a radio and TV personality, podcaster and fly angler. His narrative memoir, "Father's Day Creek," was published in May 2019 by Apprentice House at Loyola University Maryland.

5 thoughts on “Recipe: Rigatoni dolci e piccanti”

  1. Hundreds of writers and analysts are currently offering individual and varietal interpretations of beating of dead horses (Bondi, immoral cabinet members, etc), but not Dan Rodricks. Thank you for keeping us informed and letting us breathe periodically with your generous and kindly presented recipes and stories of food in your house (Rose!), of kindness, fishing (though pulling hooks from mouths and throwing them back, not my thing), and a host of other signs of a better intentioned humanity. I also want to encourage readers to see you perform on stage, if they have not already, as you are an enthusiastically gentle force of (very talented) nature.

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      1. So many things going on at the same time (politics, bridge, doing my tax return). The food looks really yummy.

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