Pbenjay's Blog

That’s right, there’s no recipe;  If the New York Times Cooking and Food section can do it, so can I, lol.  I worked late tonight, almost to 7:00 and walked home.  The last thing I wanted to do was cook dinner but I did because I knew I needed to use up those asparagus and that bag of arugula, not to mention I still had the quart of grape tomatoes I bought last Friday.

So here’s what I did and you can do it too – this is really simple and very delicious if I do say so myself.  I put of pot of salted water on the stove to boil for the linguine.  I put a tiny bit of olive oil, a good-size pat of butter and a garlic clove (minced) in a frying pan and threw in a couple of handfuls of grape tomatoes, on low heat.  I chopped up a bunch of asparagus  and another garlic clove and put them in my braising pan with some olive oil over low heat.  Seasoned everything with salt and pepper and added red pepper flakiest to the mixture.  Once  asparagus started cooking, I  turned up the heat under the water.  After the asparagus had begun to soften, I added a can of rinsed Canellini  beans and about 3/4 cup of broth to the asparagus mixture as well as the now caramelized and burst tomatoes.    I added the cooked pasta (reserving a cup of the water) to the braising pan, tossed it well and sprinkled it with Romano cheese.  And there you have a tasty dish made with ingredients that were hanging out in the refrigerator.