Caper Capers (or, "Adventures in Pasta")

On Monday, Giada at Home featured a recipe for “Pasta Ponza” that I was dying to try.  It sounded delicious, vegetarian, and simple.  Perfect for dinner.  I printed the recipe and went to the store.

Adventure #1:  I don’t know if it’s just my supermarket, or if this is the case everywhere (if you have insight, please let me know!) but apparently whole wheat pasta doesn’t come in 16 oz packages.  The recipe calls for a pound of pasta, so I bought 2 13.25 oz packages and gave it my best guess.  But really, why would they do that?  This is what you get for trying to eat better.

After that, it was smooth sailing.  Like I said, the recipe is really simple:

Halve the cherry tomatoes, mix with oil, capers, salt and pepper, cover with breadcrumbs and tomatoes and cook for about 1/2 an hour.  Remove the tomatoes from the oven, mix with pasta and cheese and serve.  Easy as pie (or pasta), right?  Obviously, the recipe has more details, but that’s about it.

Which brings us to the Caper Caper.

My family and I are eating and I notice pretty quick that the capers don’t taste right.  They’re not as soft as capers usually are…and they’re spicy.  I know they’re not spoiled, because I just opened the jar…but they do taste a lot like pepper.  Mom also thinks this is strange.  Dad, however, thinks this is wonderful.  Way better than capers.

Sure enough…

In my defense, when my mother and I purchased them, they were right next to the capers.  And they look like capers. And they’re in liquid, like capers.

But they are not capers.

Nevertheless, dinner was pretty good, and Dad spent most of it applauding my “mistake” and suggesting that I always make it that way.  Maybe I will (but I do like capers…)