Category Archives: Pasta

December 8, 2012 · 9:38 pm

Crisp Vegetables & Pasta Smothered with Satay Sauce

Would it surprise anyone to know that my fall has been filled with quick, simple dinners that translate well into leftovers that I can tote to work or school the next day?  Life has been intensely busy with school, work at the clinic, and wedding planning. Most of it has been challenging and fun, but it hasn’t left a lot of time for the cooking projects I’d like to do. The transition from fall to winter is one of my favorite seasons in part because of all the produce and comfort foods that are great this time of year. It isn’t quite winter here yet in Boston, so hopefully I’ll get to showcase a few more of my ideas. And I only have two more weeks left in my Master’s program before my internship starts, so I can see the light at the end of the tunnel work-wise. 

But for now, I’m really focusing on simple, cheap, and delicious. Which, luckily, this satay pasta is. It’s got the crunch and brightness of fresh vegetables cooked to just tender, with a luscious peanut sauce on top. I’ve made the pasta + tofu + peanut sauce combination before, and I think it’s a great introduction to new flavors and ingredients (like tofu or bok choy). Continue reading →

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August 21, 2012 · 10:45 pm

Creamy Lemon Pasta

As I mentioned last time, I spent a wonderful weekend in New York City with my sister, and one of the highlights of that trip was a meal we had at a restaurant in TriBeCa called Pepolino’s. I ordered cinghiale, a dish I’d tried before, and my sister ordered a simple but delicious creamy lemony pasta. It was the kind of night where we closed the place down. So when the Recipe Redux group announced that our challenge this month was to describe your favorite summer vacation meal (and pair it with a recipe for a slightly healthier version of the dish), I thought back to that celebratory weekend in NYC. This was a bit of a challenge because 1) creamy pasta can be the be-all and end-all of luxurious meals (at least I think so), and sometimes trying to make it healthy just changes it into a different beast altogether, and 2) cream + lemon often just equals a curdled mess. So how did this restaurant get such luscious creamy pasta that was so absolutely infused with the flavor of lemon without breaking the rules of cooking?

The answer, most likely, is fat and lots of it. In the past, I’ve made soups and pastas with “lighter” ingredients that can’t stand up to the heat of cooking let alone the acidity of lemons. And using high-fat ingredients, like heavy cream instead of milk or low-fat yogurt, provides enough of a buffer to prevent the protein from curdling. So, knowing that the challenge to making a healthy version of this creamy pasta would focus on cutting out the cream, I turned to eggs. Adding eggs to cooked pasta (a la carbonara) can result in a surprisingly creamy and rich dish without adding cream (you’re still adding calories, cholesterol, and some saturated fat, but it’s a win overall).

Then the challenge was the lemon flavor. The first time around, I added 4 Tablespoons of lemon juice and the zest of 1 1/2 lemons, which really delivered on the lemon flavor, but I thought it was way too tart, verging on bitter. David loved it, so if you’re someone who can’t get enough lemon, add some lemon zest even though the recipe below leaves it out. In the final rendition that I made just this last weekend, I added a bit of white wine to complement the flavors and cut the over-zealous flavor of the lemon and added a bit of half and half to make sure the dish really did deliver with the promise of a creamy texture.

The results? This is close: it absolutely has a fantastic lemon flavor, it’s creamy, and it’s satisfying. But I think nothing can quite capture the magic of dinner out in New York City with family or friends. But for an at-home recreation, I think this is quite a success.

Creamy Lemon Pasta
Inspired by Pepolino’s in NYC

Ingredients
3/4 lb. spaghetti
2 whole eggs + 1 egg yolk
4 Tablespoons lemon juice
1 cup frozen peas
1/2 cup white wine
1/2 cup half and half
1/3 cup Parmesan cheese

Steps
1. Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Add the pasta and cook until done (according to package directions or to taste). Reserve 1 cup of the pasta water. Drain and return the pasta to the pot immediately.
2. While pasta cooks, separate one egg yolk and whisk it together with the two remaining eggs. As soon as the cooked pasta is returned to the pot, pour in the eggs and stir vigorously. The goal is to coat the strands of spaghetti evenly without letting clumps of eggs cook into chunks of scrambled egg in the middle of your pasta.
3. Once the eggs have been thoroughly incorporated and coat the pasta evenly, add the peas, then add the lemon juice and stir again. Finally, had the wine, then the half and half, stirring after each addition. Sprinkle with Parmesan cheese and serve.



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July 18, 2012 · 4:19 pm

Spaghetti with Cilantro-Peanut Pesto

I’ve been on a bit of a Southwestern kick lately. Over the last year, I’ve made more and more dishes that involve the classic combination of cilantro, lime, corn, tomatoes, and beans. Part of it has to do with the fact that so many of the things you can make with a Southwestern bent are actually super healthy. Whole wheat quesadillas filled with cumin-scented black beans, onions, and cheese; stuffed peppers with corn and avocado, cheesy enchiladas with beans and tomatoes. These are all things that I’ve been making over and over again throughout the spring and into the summer. Even though it’s been crazy hot out lately, I managed to crank up my oven to 400-degrees for the sake of those enchiladas.

Part of the equation is that all of these dishes can be made with a few staple ingredients, cycling through the different recipes so you’re eating a different meal with slightly different flavors every night, yet nothing goes to waste because it’s languishing, unused, in your fridge.

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May 17, 2012 · 1:22 pm

Fiddlehead Fern Shrimp Scampi

I was ready to post this recipe at 12:30 last night, but as I hit “Publish,” an error message popped up and erased the whole post. At midnight, I was too spent to cobble together what I could remember of my original writing, but I thought it was a fitting end (hopefully) to a week that’s had some pretty messy flops in the kitchen. I guess it happens to everyone; sometimes things just don’t work out. Ideas that you think might turn into fantastic recipes fall flat. A few days ago, for example, instead of sweet potato and chickpea fritters, I had a disintegrated, oily mess. What that means is that the next few posts I’ve developed include some of the quick and easy meals I’ve made for dinner as a Plan B, when my bigger ideas didn’t pan out.

This fiddlehead pasta dish is a good start to my series of flops. My sister came to visit me earlier this month and brought a small paper bag full of these fiddlehead ferns. The first time we made fiddleheads, it turned out disastrously. It was a few years ago, and we were up in the Green Mountains of Vermont, celebrating my parents’ 30th wedding anniversary. We hiked along the trails and saw these ferns growing in the wild, and we were intrigued when we saw them for sale at the local market. My family and I bought a bundle, cooked them up, and ate them. And they were so bitter. As I’ve since learned, fiddlehead ferns need to be steamed for a few minutes before adding them to a dish, like this pasta. Here, I sauté the fiddlehead ferns for four minutes and then plunge them into an ice bath to halt the cooking process. Then, after cooking the shrimp and pasta, I add the ferns to the olive oil sauce. It turned out beautifully.

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April 21, 2012 · 6:13 pm

Spring Garlic Carbonara

This dish has been a winter-long workhorse for me. I must have made it at least a half dozen times over our cold, though snow-less Boston winter. I even made it for my parents when I went home for Christmas. It’s the kind of dish that always sounds like a good idea: pasta studded with just the right amount of crispy, salty pancetta, coated with a rich, creamy (yet cream-less) sauce, and still loaded with a ton of vegetables. I knew I’d post it here in the next few months, but hadn’t found the right excuse. It’s the meal you make late at night, exhausted, after work, and you don’t bother to take photos of the food on the plate because it doesn’t stay there long anyway.

And then this month’s Recipe Redux topic was announced: the first shoots of spring. The theme highlights the first fresh produce of the season, and the recipes (check out more contributions to the Redux below) incorporate a wide range of veggies including ramps, Carolina sweet onions, and asparagus. And I though: what a perfect opportunity to introduce this fabulous carbonara.

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April 12, 2012 · 8:20 pm

Spaghetti with a Puttanesca Puree

I’ve never been a big fan of puttanesca pasta, but it’s one my good friend Kerri’s favorites, and I think of her every time I see it on a menu. I’ve always wanted to like it, and on paper, it makes sense that I should. It’s got garlic, onions, tomatoes, and anchovies: so why didn’t I like it when they all came together in a sauce?

With this recipe, I seem to have fixed the issue. Most importantly, I got rid of the capers, a traditional, briny ingredient that I think was causing most of my problems. The other quick fix that I found immensely helpful was pureeing the sauce into a marinara-like consistency. A traditional puttanesca sauce is kind of like a stew: there a bunch of discrete bits and pieces that blend together over time and the flavors meld, but each bite doesn’t necessarily capture the whole dish at once. Making a sauce with a uniform texture is the perfect solution and will also help others who might be hesitant about adding anchovies or olives to their pasta.

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February 27, 2012 · 9:42 pm

Pasta with a creamy roasted red pepper & goat cheese sauce

So often, when I think about what I want to make for dinner, I crave creamy pasta. Obviously, loading up a plate of pasta with heavy cream and cheese isn’t going to work out in the long term, so a lot of my experiments over the fall and winter months have been playing around with different ways to turn vegetables into a healthy pasta dish that’s still creamy and cheesy. And, after watching a few episodes of Chopped, you start to realize you can puree just about anything into a sauce. I made this dish a couple of times, and I’ve found that the key to this combination is the Parmesan. It’s saltiness is the perfect bridge between the sweetness of the roasted peppers and the tang of the goat cheese. Without the Parm, the goat cheese + red pepper combination falls a bit flat, and the end result is a lackluster, too-sweet red mess.

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December 2, 2011 · 6:43 pm

Cheesy Chicken Casserole with Kale

A tale of two pastas: one decadent and delicious, the other a healthier bake that still tastes impossibly fresh and cheesy. After David and I planned our Thanksgiving menu, we bent our heads together over the grocery lists and divvied up the ingredients we needed to buy by store: Whole Foods will have happy turkeys and chorizo sausage, let’s get them there and Trader Joe’s has the cheaper frozen corn and potatoes, it makes sense to get those there. But when we came home on Wednesday night with our bags of goodies, we found that we hadn’t exactly sorted out who should buy the staples and ended up with three pints of heavy cream. Whoops. Some got used up in a rather lackluster cauliflower gratin, more of it in a pre-Thanksgiving clam chowder David made, and a little topped off the pumpkin pie. But as the weekend drew to a close, we still had 2 almost-full pints sitting in the fridge. Continue reading →

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October 16, 2011 · 9:59 pm

Pastitsio or Greek Lasagne

Looking back at the meals I made last week and the recipes I earmarked to make in the future, I can tell it was a stressful week. I had a couple of exams and presentations in school over the last two weeks, and I think I was craving comfort food. I also recently started a subscription to Saveur magazine, which I’m really excited about. I started receiving a weekly e-mail from them with recipes included, and this take on Pastitsio, or Greek lasagna, caught my eye. It isn’t the healthiest thing in the world, but it uses a hearty, creamy bechamel sauce instead of cheese layers, which helped turn this dish into a more elegant take on macaroni and cheese. 
I’m not really sure what makes this a “Greek lasagne” — one adaptation I made to the recipe was adding Greek seasoning to the beef while it’s cooking — but I don’t necessarily need it to be super-authentic because it was delicious as-is. It was a good thing this both David and I liked this dish because it made a lot. Like two full lasagna-sized dishes. Granted, neither one was in the standard baking dish, but still. The leftovers from this recipe served as lunch for both of us the last half of the week… and David polished off the last plate this afternoon.

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October 13, 2011 · 4:04 pm

Homemade Gnocchi with a Creamy Blue Cheese Sauce

I spent a big chunk of Monday evening making these gnocchi after studying most of the weekend for an exam at school. The recipe comes from the September issue of Cook’s Illustrated, and since it’s full of useful cooking science advice, I thought I’d have plenty to share about my experience making the gnocchi. Like gluten development when kneading the potato-flour mixture and starch granules within the potatoes themselves.  But then I tried to modify the sauce recipe (taking out the heavy cream and replacing it with half-and-half) and it all fell apart on me. Literally. First, I combined the wine and heavy cream in a skillet, turned on the heat, and it curdled. Thinking that the heat was on too high too soon, I started over with the heat way down and just the cream.

And it curdled. Curious about what I was doing wrong, I turned to Shirley Corriher’s Cookwise book, a reference I used during my food science class last year. I was doing most everything wrong, it turns out, because I was making a reduction sauce. Shirley lists a few reasons for what happened to my sauce:
- The wine: If it isn’t boiled before adding the dairy element, the milk or cream can curdle. Alcohol and other compounds need to undergo chemical changes (caused by heat) before adding the cream.
- Using lower-fat dairy: By not using cream, there wasn’t enough fat in my sauce to coat the milk proteins. Heat and acid (like the wine) can cause these proteins to unwind and reform as coagulated masses. Adding a starch element can help with this issue.

After two attempts, I switched to heavy cream and followed the recipe as outlined in the recipe. Both the gnocchi and the sauce turned out wonderfully. Having spent time in the Cook’s Illustrated offices, I knew the recipe was a winner, but I was trying to lighten it up a bit. Guess I’ll save that project for another time.

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