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Lots of people have a kitchen garden. Frank Pendola has a kitchen yard.
When Pendola built his Bar Harbor home, he skipped the whole lawn idea and turned every inch of land into vegetable gardens, with pampered tomato vines and a plot devoted to garlic. There’s not a flower in sight, save for the window boxes his fiancee, Janice Noveroske, planted on the porch.
“You won’t find a blade of grass here,” Pendola said. “My feeling is, if you can’t eat it, why grow it?”
Pendola makes the harvest last all year. His basement is full of neatly stacked jars of home-canned tomatoes. A crate full of cascade hops for his home-brew dries in the corner. A large freezer opens to reveal bricks of Pendola’s signature pasta sauce. And near the stairs, bunches of garlic hang on the wall, while bulbs of seed garlic cure in bushel baskets, ready for Saturday’s Town Hill Garlic Festival, which Pendola started five years ago (see sidebar).
“All of the things I’m doing now, I did as a kid growing up in Niagara Falls,” Pendola said, sitting on the porch swing, as the sounds of a Frank Sinatra CD filtered out of the house’s open windows. “We always had garlic in the garden.”
His indoctrination into cooking and gardening began at a tender age, but it almost came to an abrupt halt one spring. His Italian grandmother had asked him to dig up the garden to prepare it for planting, but he made the mistake of digging up the garlic, which was planted the previous autumn.
“Needless to say, nobody would talk to me for a week because I dug up Nonni’s garlic,” he said, laughing.
Though he “fled” Niagara Falls after high school, the lessons he learned there stuck with him through years of college and graduate school. When he moved to Bar Harbor in 1992 to work as a molecular biologist at The Jackson Laboratory, the first thing he did was plant a garden at his apartment. In the years that followed, he lived in six more apartments, but he always found room for a garden.
“Since I’ve been here, my whole goal was to find a home to start working on the lifestyle for myself that I’d imagined, that involved cooking and gardening,” he said.
At 45, it seems Pendola has achieved his goal. He has built a home, the heart of which is the kitchen. He has carved a garden out of the landscape. And two years ago, he met his Noveroske, also a scientist at The Jackson Laboratory. He figured that since she was new to the island and she didn’t know anyone, he’d invite her over on a Saturday, his traditional cooking day. His friends would all be there, so it was a no-pressure situation.
“I invited her over to have something to eat,” he said. “Lo and behold, she showed up.”
That day, Pendola made minestrone soup, but it wasn’t until a few weeks later, when he was teaching Noveroske how to make prosciutto-mushroom ravioli, that they fell in love.
“By the end of that afternoon, we knew we had a pretty good connection,” Noveroske said. “It was over food. That’s really funny.”
Their relationship hit a minor snag, however, when Pendola came home to find Noveroske eating alfredo sauce. Out of a jar. Made by Ragu.
“He said, ‘Get out!'” Noveroske said, laughing.
Homemade is essential to Pendola, who spends the entire weekend – every weekend – cooking. It begins Friday night, when he starts to work on his three-day pasta sauce. On Saturday, while the sauce is simmering, he makes pizzas, ricotta gnocchi, or maybe even a batch of homemade limoncello, a sweet lemon liqueur. He also is an avid home-brewer.
“You can’t dynamite me out of the house on the weekend,” Pendola said. “I’m cooking from the time I get up to the time I go to bed.”
If their friends want to see them, they know they need to stop by rather than invite the couple out to dinner, so their kitchen becomes a destination. Pendola loves the company so much that he’s thinking of opening his own restaurant in a year or two.
“Everything’s going to be homegrown and homemade,” Pendola said.
He’s in the process of setting up an industrial kitchen in the basement so he can be licensed to start catering. From there, he hopes to start a restaurant that’s open a few days a week. He knows he won’t get rich doing this, but that’s OK. He just wants to share his love of food with his friends and family. And he wants to make sure that when he has children, they grow up with the same fond food memories that he has from his childhood in New York.
“When we have children, we want them to filter into it too,” Pendola said. “Maybe these will be the memories they’ll think back on – home and comfort.”
Frank Pendola’s Garden Pasta Sauce
Makes 12 quarts of sauce, plus meatballs.
Note: This recipe calls for the sauce to be left covered, at room temperature, overnight for two nights. While this contradicts traditional food-safety wisdom, Pendola, who works as a molecular biologist, has a scientific reason for doing this. Heating the sauce causes the proteins in the ingredients to race around the pot and denature, or separate from one another. At the end of the day, if you were to put the pot in the refrigerator, the proteins would stop moving and settle out. By letting it cool at room temperature, the proteins are able to renature, or, in plain English, “All of those flavors come together,” Pendola says. If you feel more comfortable refrigerating the sauce at the end of the day, that’s OK, but Pendola says you won’t end up with his sauce.
This recipe takes the better part of three days to make. If you don’t can your own tomatoes, Pendola recommends San Marzano, available at Rooster Brother in Ellsworth. When using canned tomatoes, take their salt content into consideration when seasoning. When Pendola makes this recipe, he uses Carlo Rossi’s Paisano wine. If you have a favorite Italian red, you can use that. Just don’t use so-called “cooking wine.” Pendola often makes pizza while the sauce is cooking, using toppings such as sun-dried tomatoes and dried porcini mushrooms, which he soaks in water. He saves the soaking water from both and adds it while adding the wine.
For sauce:
Good quality extra-virgin olive oil (the finest you can find)
1 head garlic
2 red onions, chopped coarsely
Dried oregano, marjoram, sage and thyme, crushed and combined in equal proportions
2 red bell peppers
3-4 links homemade pork sausage
3/4-pound or 1-pound piece of pork (shoulder or butt), bone-in
Dried basil, crushed
Salt and black pepper, to taste
12 quarts canned Roma tomatoes
1 cup red wine
1 cup grated Pecorino-Romano cheese
For meatballs:
1/2 pound each ground beef (85 percent lean), ground pork and ground veal
2 eggs
2-3 slices Italian bread
1 cup Pecorino-Romano cheese
Minced garlic
Salt and pepper, to taste
Cover the bottom of a 16-quart stockpot with extra-virgin olive oil. Place on burner over low heat. Finely chop enough fresh garlic to cover the bottom of the pot in one layer. Cover the garlic with a layer of chopped red onions and add 1 tablespoon of the dried herb mixture, crushing the herbs to release flavor. Cover and cook until onions and garlic begin to release their aroma.
Add the pork. Cover and brown in pan with onions and garlic. This may take awhile, but Pendola says the more time you take to brown the meat, the more flavorful your sauce will be. When meat is browned on all sides, add chopped red peppers and heat, stirring frequently, so they cook but don’t brown.
Stab sausage links with a fork and add to pot. Add 1 tablespoon basil, crushing to release flavor, and freshly ground black pepper to taste. Cover and brown meat, turning to cook all sides. Again, this may take awhile.
When sausage is fully browned, add tomatoes and wine and mix well. Cover the pot and slowly bring to a boil. This could take up to 2 hours.
“You want to have a beer and listen to Sinatra” while things are heating up, Pendola says.
You also want to prepare the meatballs. Soak Italian bread in water, drain. Combine ground beef, pork and veal in a large bowl. Add bread, eggs, 2-3 cloves minced garlic (or to taste), cheese, salt and pepper. Mash together, using your hands, until ingredients are fully blended. If you’d like, add a couple tablespoons full of wine. Form into large meatballs. Set aside.
As the sauce reaches a slow, rolling boil, drop in meatballs. Cover and continue to cook over low heat until sauce returns to a boil. Remove cover, stir, and sprinkle an “island” of Pecorino-Romano cheese on top. Sprinkle the dried herb mixture and the basil (about a tablespoon, total) on top of the cheese. Peel 3 cloves of garlic, cut off the ends and place in the middle of the island of cheese. Do not stir. Do not cover.
The cheese, garlic and herbs will slowly disperse into the sauce. As the sauce cooks, the fat from the pork and sausage will float to the top. Skim it off periodically. Leave the sauce on the stove on very low heat until you are ready for bed. Shut off the heat, put the cover back on, and turn the heat back on in the morning.
Cook again over low heat, stirring frequently, skimming occasionally, all day. Again, when you go to bed, turn off heat, return cover and let cool. If you feel more comfortable refrigerating the sauce, it won’t hurt the flavor to refrigerate it now, but Pendola prefers to leave it at room temperature overnight.
On the third day, place the pot full of sauce over low heat again, uncovered. If you’d like, you can add chicken, baby-back ribs, or any other meat that you’d like once the sauce reaches a simmer. In the last hour of cooking (whenever you plan to serve it), chop fresh thyme, marjoram and sage and sprinkle on top of the sauce. Five minutes before you’re ready to serve it, add fresh basil and stir.
Bring water for pasta to boil. Add enough sauce to a saute pan to cover – but not drown – your pasta. In the last 2 minutes of cooking your pasta, drain and transfer to the saute pan over low heat, allowing the pasta to finish cooking in the sauce.
Serve and add garnish with fresh parsley and a shaving of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese.
(Pull quote) If you can’t eat it, why grow it?” – Frank Pendola
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