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Posts Tagged ‘Everyday Food’

Every day that I post another pasta recipe especially one that isn’t one with gravy, the traditional tomato sauce served with meatballs and/or sausage, I marvel at the seemingly endless ways there are to  incorporate two great food groups;  Pasta, that filling carbohydrate, whose very lack of flavor (except for Barilla), lends itself as a base canvas upon which we can create delicious vegetable dishes from nature’s own colorful palette.  And to think, growing up in my Italian household, I never had any pasta that didn’t have tomato sauce on it except for Friday’s Aglio e Olio, a recipe that I must post – maybe next Friday.

INGREDIENTS:

2 TBS EV Olive oil

1 medium yellow onion diced medium

2 medium zucchini, diced medium

1/2 lb cemini or button mushrooms, trimmed and quartered

2 garlic cloves, minced

1 can (28 oz) tomato purée

coarse salt and ground pepper

2 TBS fresh oregano leaves, coarsely chopped

1 lb rigatoni**

DIRECTIONS:

In medium pot or braising pan, heat oil over medium-high.  Add onion and cook till translucent, about 5 minutes.  Add zucchini and mushrooms and cook until vegetables soften slightly, about 4 minutes.  Add garlic and cook until fragrant, 30 seconds.  Add tomato purée, season with salt and pepper, and bring mixture to a boil.  Reduce heat to a rapid simmer and cook until zucchini is crisp-tender, about 8 mintues.  Stir in oregano.

Meanwhile, in a large pot of boiling, salted water, cook pasta until al dente.  Reserve 1 cup cooking liquid; drain pasta and add to sauce, tossing to combine and adding enough pasta water to create a sauce that coats pasta.  Serve immediately.

** You can substitute ziti or penne rigate for the rigatoni. Also dicing the vegetables rather small allows them to tuck into the tube pasta.

Recipe from Martha Stewart EveryDay Food

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Pasta with Roasted Vegetables and Arugula

Pasta with Roasted Vegetables and Arugula

What could be more appropriate for this season than a pasta dish that uses ingredients that are fresh and readily available?  This is another quick dish to serve on a busy weekday evening.  And the ingredients are simple enough to find, I might even send the hubby to the store while I’m at work today and whip this up later!

INGREDIENTS:

2 pints grape tomatoes

4 garlic cloves, unpeeled

3 shallots, cut into eighths

2 TBS fresh thyme leaves

2 TBS EV olive oil

coarse salt and ground pepper

8 oz rigatoni pasta

1/3 cup pitted olives such as Niçoise, coarsely chopped

3 cups baby arugula or spinach

DIRECTIONS:

Preheat oven to 450º.  Place tomatoes, garlic, shallots and thyme on rimmed baking sheet.  Toss with oil and season with salt and pepper.  Roast until tomatoes burst, shallots are browned and garlic is soft, 20-25 minutes.

Meanwhile cook pasta in boiling salted water till al dente.  Reserve 1/4-1/2 cup pasta water.  Drain pasta and return to pot.

Peel roasted garlic and mash flat with knife.  Add to pasta pot along with vegetables, olives and pasta water.  Cook over medium-high until sauce thickens, about 3 minutes.  Let cool slightly, then toss in arugula

Recipe from Martha Stewart EveryDay Food

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Today’s entry in the Macaroni Marathon is a tasty pasta dish just perfect for the winter.  With fresh local vegetables out of reach and certainly we’re not buying any of those pink tennis balls that are being passed off as tomatoes, right?  Well of course not;  First of all you can make the best tomato sauce from canned tomatoes.  There are lots of sauces that can be made using the seasonal vegetables of winter and we’ll get to them too, but today I’m using those sweet cherry or grape tomatoes – I never eat any other kind in the winter because well really, they’re not really tomatoes.

Sweet Cherry Tomatoes

Sweet Cherry Tomatoes

INGREDIENTS:    

Coarse salt and ground pepper

1 lb linguine

1 TBS olive oil plus more for serving

3/4 lb cherry tomatoes halved                                         

1/4 cup plus 2TBS tapenade

2 cups baby arugula

2 TBS chopped fresh parsley

1 1/2 oz feta cheese, crumbled (1/4 cup)

DIRECTIONS:

Cook linguine according to package instructions.  Drain pasta.  In pot, heat oil over medium.  Add tomatoes and cook, stirring occasionally, until slightly softened, about 3 minutes.

Return pasta to pot, stir in tapenade and cook until heated through.  Add arugula and toss to combine.  Season with salt and pepper.

Divide among four bowls, drizzle with oil and sprinkle with parsley and feta.

Serves 4

Martha Stewart's Everyday Food

Martha Stewart’s Everyday Food

Recipe from Everyday Food

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Short Pasta

The Many Moods of Macaroni

I consider myself a good cook, however, tonight I proved that corollary wrong!  I improvised a recipe and even as I was doing it, I knew it wasn’t going to be good.  And it was a classic case of being penny wise and pound foolish.  I had it in mind to make a pasta dish tonight that I had seen in Martha Stewart‘s everyday Food.  

The dish is Orrechiette with broccoli rabe, oregano and lemon.  It’s simple, easy and quick to make and I thought it was the perfect dish to make tonight as I was out all day and didn’t want to prepare something that needed a lot of prep or ingredients.

Here’s the recipe:

3/4 # of orrechiette

1 bunch of broccoli rabe (about 1#) trimmed and cut into 1 1/2 inch pieces

1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil

4 garlic cloves thinly sliced

1/2 tsp red pepper flakes

1 TBS fresh oregano leaves for serving

2-3 TBS fresh lemon juice for serving

Cook pasta according to directions , adding broccoli rabe 4 minutes before pasta is done.

Meanwhile in a small saucepan, heat oil, garlic and red pepper flakes over medium heat till garlic begins to sizzle.

Drain pasta and broccoli rabe and return to pot.  Add oil mixture and toss to coat; season with coarse salt and pepper.  To serve, sprinkle oregano over pasta and drizzle with lemon juice.

It was really tasty and certainly easy to prepare.  Here’s where I made my mistake and I did know better;  When a recipe calls for a certain type and shape of macaroni (pasta to you all), there’s a reason.  This is a weekly debate in our house as my husband (who is not Italian) only likes linguine.  Seriously he likes linguine with any and all kinds of sauces.  Different shapes have different densities and are able to hold the sauce better than others.  Some penne have lines like penne rigate as opposed to ziti and the sauce will cling to one and not the other.

This recipe called for orrechiette (little ears) and they are small, slightly dense and concave.  I love Wegman’s Food store, you all know that already, but lately I have a gripe with them;  Over that last six months, Wegman’s has been eliminating the shelf space allotted to Barilla (my absolute favorite)  and DeCecco brand of pasta and filling the shelves with their own brand.  So when I looked for Barilla’s orrechiette there wasn’t any.  In fact, even in the Wegman’s pasta, super pasta and whole wheat pasta sections, there weren’t any orrechiette.  BUT, in their Wegman’s Classic Italian line which comes in all kinds of exotic shapes and is packaged in a clear cellophane bag, they did have orrechiette BUT that pasta line is priced in the $3.00+ category and I just couldn’t justify spending that much on the pasta itself.  MISTAKE! Well not really, I should have gone elsewhere.  Instead, I cruised the aisle back and forth and back and forth trying to discern what other shape might be substitutable for the little ears.  There really wasn’t anything and I settled on some very small penne regate that Barilla calls Piccolini Penne and it cooks in 7 minutes.  The end result was that the penne cooked very quickly and even though I tried to cook it according to the package directions (something I NEVER do) and add the rabe at the right moment, the penne were a little soft.  We like our pasta al dente, the orrechiette would have been perfect.  So I saved some money and made a dish that was tasty but could have been fantastic. 

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If there was ever a day to eat junk food and/or fattening, artery-clogging food, THIS WOULD BE THE DAY!

But wait, not necessarily! Here is a quick and simple and heart-healthy quesadilla – perfect for the game tonight.

GOAT CHEESE AND MANGO QUESADILLAS

4 oz goat cheese room temperature

4 6″ whole wheat tortillas

1 ripe mango thinly sliced

1 jalapeno pepper thinly sliced (seeded)

1/2 red onion thinly sliced

fresh cilantro leaves

Spread the goat cheese on the whole tortilla and then layer mango, onion, pepper and cilantro on one half.  Fold over and brown and crisp in a large skillet over med-hi heat.

Quick and delicious!

Recipe from Martha Stewart‘s Everyday Food

Super Bowl Sunday snack, heart-healthy

Goat Cheese and Mango Quesadilla


 

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