Another quick pasta meal incorporating some vegetables from the garden (roughly a pasta alla norma): Fry small eggplants in a little olive oil for 10-15 minutes until soft (should have peeled them first), season and set aside. Saute some onions and garlic and chili flake– then add diced tomatoes and cook down (maybe 15 minutes). Add the eggplant back in, combine with pasta, pistachios, grated parmesan, and lots of chopped fresh basil… ...
This summer I grew a small plot of fava beans– not enough for a main dish, but I improvised a sauce for pasta combining fresh favas, green garlic, a few anchovy filets, pecorino, parsley, and mint (plus more cheese at the end):
An easy weeknight two-pot meal combining a range of fall ingredients I like. Wash, trim, and chop two leeks (keeping most of the green part as well) Put them in a skillet with a pat of butter on low heat, salt, cover, and let slowly cook for about 30 minutes as they give off water and reduce, until creamy-soft and sweet (stir once every 5 minutes or so) While they’re cooking, skin and dice eggplants (I used 6 tiny eggplants from the garden, could also use one medium eggplant). Add them to the leeks for the last 15 minutes or so of the cooking time. Clean and roughly break up chanterelle mushrooms, add them for the last 3-4 minutes. Boil salty water for pasta, cook the pasta, throw diced green beans in for the last minute. Drain the pasta, add to the skillet, and cook another minute. Serve. ...
I thinned some carrot seedlings out of the backyard garden to give other carrots room to grow… and remembered I’d heard of carrot top pesto. Indeed, the leaves plus green garlic tops from the garden, olive oil, pistachios, salt, and a little bit of parmesan cheese made a nice nutty pesto. We ate it tossed with pasta, some 2-minute-blanched peas (some from the garden, some from the store), and spigarello sauteed with the baby carrots and garlic from last summer’s harvest. ...
results of pasta class: hand-pulling orecchiette: agnolotti filled with rabbit and pork
Sliced tangerine, satsuma, grapefruit, lemon, with pomegranate, feta, balsamic vinegar. Spaghetti boiled to al dente, drained, a little water reserved. This pasta water, heavy cream, olive oil, and lemon zest boiled, then tossed with the pasta, along with grated pecorino and two lemons’ worth of juice. Delicious! (hat tip to holly)
Quick dinner a week ago: A salad of arugula, watermelon radishes, endive, kumquats, a little olive oil. Tart / colorful. Spaghetti with homemade sauce (shallots and garlic sauteed in olive oil, oyster mushrooms cut coarse and cooked down, sliced zucchini, summer-canned Juliet tomatoes, fresh oregano, a little crushed red pepper and salt).
Using nearly the same ingredients as Tuesday’s dinner, something simpler (about 20 minutes from start to finish, 2 pans) and still tasty: The sauce was a shallot and a huge pile of minced garlic (about half a head), sauteed in olive oil for maybe 5 minutes until golden brown, plus cherry tomatoes, a little chicken stock, olives, black pepper, and red pepper flakes, simmered for another 10+ minutes. The nearly-done bowtie pasta was then finished in the sauce for another 2 minutes. Plus parsley and haloumi. ...
I’d been craving kasha, that staple of russian jewish grandmothers everywhere, so I sat down and made it. A cup of buckwheat groats mixed with a beaten egg and toasted for a few minutes in a skilled until dry. Onion, salt, and pepper sauteed in oil. Chicken stock boiled in a heavy pan and then both of those added to it, and cooked covered over low heat for about 12 minutes, before adding in cooked bowtie pasta. Solid. ...
Here’s a quick post-bike-ride dinner I assembled in 30 minutes from getting home to sitting down to eat (I say “assembled” because I picked up major premade components from Rainbow on the ride home– go ahead, think less of me). 1. Boiled water (slowly on my sad electric stove) and also heated milk on medium high with a few pinches of salt, stirring frequently to avoid scorching. 2. Shelled some fresh cranberry beans (they caught my eye after a recent conversation and a dinner at Camino). ...