Tag Archives: pasta

Fettuccini with Roasted Red Corn

Roasted Red Corn Linguine, and Some Things I’ve Never Tried

I found red sweet corn at Whole Foods last week.  Not Indian corn.  Not the band Korn painted all up in red.  Red sweet corn.  I’d never even seen it in a store before, let alone tried it.  So I bought some, because what do you do when confronted with something new and mysterious?  You eat it.  It works for babies, it works for puppies, it can work for you, too.

redcornwoil

I’ve also never tried putting corn in pasta before.  I’ve seen it, and I’ve avoided it for a long time.  I shy against putting two carbs together in the same dish, I don’t know why.  It’s like carbs all the way down, and it makes me feel guilty.  But despite that, I decided to make linguine and add the sweet corn in to it.

It was delicious.

redcorn

Of course it was.  I wouldn’t take the time to write up a recipe that was gross or disgusting, not to mention all the photos.  What kind of bored monster do you think I am?

Anyway, other things I’ve never tried:

-Eating an entire plate of Cap’n Crunch french toast from the Bomber (it exists and it is delicious but I fear it would kill me)

-Eating green eggs with a fox.  Eating green eggs in a box.  Eating green eggs here or there, eating green eggs anywhere.

-Strawberries that taste like pineapples.

-Making tiny ice cream sandwiches out of those little cookies they give you on Delta flights.

-Rambutans.

-Making my own puff pastry because I don’t hate my free time that much.

-Chocolate covered grasshoppers.

redcornpasta-mixing

Now, I’m not saying that all of those things would be as delicious as this roasted red corn pasta…except for the french toast.  That would probably do it.  But I’m a little more inclined now to try…everything except the grasshoppers.  Maybe the grasshoppers.  Probably not the grasshoppers.

redcornpasta

Roasted Red Corn Linguine, and Other Things I’ve Never Tried

Ingredients

    For the Corn:
  • 2 ears fresh red sweet corn
  • 1/2-3/4 cup olive oil
  • 1 cup fresh basil
  • 3 whole peeled garlic cloves
  • 1/4 tsp black pepper
  • 1/2 tsp sea salt
  • For the Chicken
  • 1 pound boneless, skinless chicken breasts
  • 1/4 cup olive oil
  • 1 cup cherry tomatoes
  • 1/4 tsp black pepper
  • 1/2 tsp sea salt
  • For everything else
  • 1 pound fresh linguine noodles, cooked according to package directions
  • 1/2 cup fresh basil, chopped
  • 1 cup sliced red onion
  • 2 cups green beans, cut in half
  • 1 tbsp butter
  • pecorino romano, grated--however much you want

Instructions

  1. Preheat the oven to 400F. Line two small baking pans with tin foil.
  2. Prepare the corn: place the oil, basil, garlic, pepper and salt in a blender and puree. Brush a few tablespoons of the oil mixture all over the sweet corn. Place the corn in one of the prepared pans.
  3. Prepare the chicken: in the other tinfoiled pan, place the boneless, skinless chicken breasts and the cherry tomatoes. Drizzle the olive oil over both and sprinkle them with the salt and pepper.
  4. Place both pans in the oven and roast for 30 minutes, or until the corn is browned and soft and the chicken is cooked through. Let cool slightly. Slice the chicken into strips. Hold each corn cob up on its end and carefully cut the corn kernels off the cobs.
  5. In a large bowl, toss the cooked linguine noodles, fresh basil, red onion, green beans, butter, chicken and corn kernels with the rest of the oil/garlic/basil mixture (from step 2). Sprinkle the pasta with the grated pecorino.
  6. Enjoy!
http://haveforkwilleat.com/2013/09/roasted-red-corn-linguine-and-some-things-ive-never-tried/

Basil Ravioli with Green Pea Sauce and Ham

Simple Basil Wonton Ravioli

Got to visit Boston for the first time this past week.  I was there for a conference and didn’t get to see a lot of the city, but I did walk a fair bit around the Back Bay area where the conference was.  It was beautiful and I can’t wait to go back.  I also got to have my first modernist, molecular gastronoy-esque meal at L’Espalier.  The dinner was incredible–you can check out my pics here.  And it was definitely an experience.

However, after a whole week of eating out, I was really ready to come home and cook something.  I also wanted something really simple.  It’s just me this weekend–Josh is in Vegas for his own conference (I know, right?)–so I figured I’d make myself something low-key.

Basil Ravioli with Green Pea Sauce and Ham

Normally, making ravioli is a little bit of a production, but for general ease, I like to use wonton wrappers.  They don’t produce exactly the same texture, but they’re good and fun nonetheless–plus, one less series of steps to take.  Here, I just wanted to showcase the basil fresh out of my garden with a little bit of creamy cheese and some olive oil.  I also wanted to use up the rest of the frozen peas sitting in my freezer, so I made another batch of delicious green pea-mint sauce.  That plus some diced, crispy ham made for a light, lovely repast.

basil ravioli

Simple Basil Wonton Ravioli Non-Recipe

Yield: 6 ravioli

Serving Size: 1

Ingredients

  • 6 wonton raviolis
  • 6 teaspoons mascarpone cheese
  • 6 small basil leaves
  • salt & pepper
  • grated parmesan cheese for sprinkling
  • 2 tbsp olive oil in a small bowl
  • 2 tbsp water in small bowl
  • 2 oz ham, chopped
  • 1 tbsp canola oil
  • 1 tbsp butter

Instructions

  1. Prepare a pot of gently simmering water.
  2. Lay out a wonton wrapper. Brush it with some of the olive oil. Place about a teaspoon of mascarpone cheese in the center and top it with a small basil leaf. Sprinkle on a little bit of salt and pepper and grated parmesan.
  3. Dip your brush into the water and brush around the edges of the wrapper. Then fold the bottom corner up to the opposite corner, creating a triangle, carefully smoothing the edges of the wrapper together into a tight seal.
  4. Repeat for each additional wonton wrapper.
  5. Gently lower the ravioli into the pot of simmering (not boiling!) water and cook for about 2-3 minutes. Remove and let dry on a paper towel.
  6. Heat up the canola oil and butter in a medium-sized frying pan. Add in the diced ham and fry until crispy, then add in the ravioli and (gently again) fry until crisp and browned on each side.
  7. Serve the ham and wonton ravioli with a healthy drizzle of green pea-mint sauce, or even just a bit of olive oil or browned butter.
http://haveforkwilleat.com/2013/08/simple-basil-wonton-ravioli/

Roasted mushroom spaghetti

I’m a simple person.  I don’t want much in life.  A warm home, a happy family, an elephant, and a few good, simple meals.  This dish basically evolved out of me wanting a tasty, light dinner but also not having gone grocery shopping in a week and not having any meat or anything thawed.

I had a few odds and ends in the fridge, including a tub of cremini mushrooms that I’d originally bought to make this garlic butter roasted mushroom recipe from Smitten Kitchen.  Instead of making the recipe as is, I decided to use it as inspiration for this pasta dish.  I want all of you health enthusiasts to note that there is no butter in this dish at all.  So there.

Oh, but there are two tablespoons of duck fat. Yeah. Continue reading

Mac&Chorizo

I’m on year two of a five year plan that was put into operation about 15 years ago.  I’m a little behind, I’ll admit.  But the plan, the plan is still good.  The plan is to take over the world.  At first I thought I’d do it with my charm and effervescent wit.  But that hasn’t panned out yet.  So now I’m thinking I’ll take a slightly different tack.  I’m going to take over the world through a slow, steady and judicious application of macaroni and cheese.

First, I get the world’s attention with irresistible bacon comfort filled baked mac& cheese.  Then I up the ante with a sophisticated, spring-friendly chicken, spinach and leek concoction.  And now I’m sealing the deal with this sassy chorizo, garlic and broccoli  mac and cheese.  It’s just a little taste of what my reign will be like: a macaroni in every pot.

Well, a penne anyway.  Or a rigatoni.  Maybe shells.  Or spirals. Continue reading

Monday Night Pantry Pasta Pretty Damn Quick

uh yes please

I picked out glasses yesterday afternoon.  Prescription sunglasses, to be precise.  I can’t really tell you what they look like though.  I’m not even really sure.  That’s the problem with having to try on glasses when you don’t wear contacts and are otherwise mostly blind.  But hey, in about 3-4 weeks when they come in, maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised!  Or horrified.  We’ll see.  Ha.  We’ll see.  Get it?  Yeah.

So after that, I walked down to Kerrytown and waited for Josh to pick me up.  It’s after five at this point.  Then we have to go get the dog because yes, my dog goes to doggy daycare once a week so he can run around and socialize like the wild beast that he is.  Of course, to get him, we have to drive through all the construction down on Main Street by Stadium and then once we’ve got him, we have to stop at the bank.  And then drive through rush-hour traffic through town because there’s no way we’re hitting I-94 at this hour and by the time we get home, settled, mail on the table, shoes off the feet, bathroom break taken care of, dog fed, etc, etc, etc, we’re looking at almost 7pm and time to make dinner and I’m starving.  I also have a lot of freelance work to do—videos to edit, DVDs to burn, that sort of thing–and don’t want to be on my feet all night cooking.  And then there’s that nagging little voice that says, “Screw cooking; order a pizza from Aubree’s.  With breadsticks.  Don’t forget my breadsticks.” Continue reading

Tomato Chicken Sauté, or “Let’s See Hansel and Gretel Push Me into THIS Oven”

It hasn’t even been a full week in our new house yet and already we’ve spent more than a little bit updating things–the cable, the washer and most notably, the oven.

I have a new oven.

Do you know what that’s like?  It’s like Papa having a brand new bag, that’s what it’s like.

It’s beautiful—all shiny and black and stainless steal.  The oven at our old apartment was a trustworthy thing; while I am not a fan of electric stovetops, the oven got hot quickly and stayed that way.  When we moved into the house on Saturday, we knew the stove (gas) worked but that the oven didn’t.  So despite my fear-of-change-driven emotional need for brownies, I had to sit and wait until a new stove was ordered and delivered.  But I could still use the stove, and I did.  It was a bit odd changing over to a gas range from an electric one—things heat up so fast!  Lovely.

The new oven (I haven’t named it yet, but I might–any suggestions?) was delivered yesterday.  Josh decided he was going to hook it up himself. This required a trip to the hardware store to get a connector-thingy.  Me, I was all twinge-y with excitement, holding the flashlight while Josh fiddled around behind the stove (which was very shiny—did I mention it was shiny?  I like shiny things). I had it all planned out—first I was going to make a chicken tomato sauté with chicken breasts I had acquired from the store that very afternoon for this very purpose, as well as some plump round cherry tomatoes, garlic and balsamic vinegar.  Then I was going to make a super-quick side dish of tricolor couscous and steamed spinach.  And then there’d be cookies.  Chocolate chip, of course, with maybe some oatmeal and I could nearly taste the chewy delici—

“It’s not going to work,” said Josh.

Well of course it’s going to work, I thought, oatmeal and chocolate go great together. Continue reading

Meal For One: Black and Green Pasta

This what I had for lunch today.  The squid ink pasta came from my mom.  It’s an egg pasta that’s been dyed a deep black color with squid ink, which also gives it a salty, kind of oily taste as well.  The great thing is that it cooks in 3 minutes.  For Halloween, I will probably make a “spooky” pasta with a nice bright orange pumpkin sauce, but today I just wanted a very simple, very light lunch, so this is what I made.  Note: this makes a light pasta dish for one; to make it more hearty, add in any of the following: 1 c. chopped broccoli, 3/4 c. shelled edamame, 4 ounces of cooked shredded chicken and/or 1 small zucchini chopped.

However, as it is, this is a very simple 5 ingredient recipe, not including the salt and pepper. Continue reading

Meal in a pot: baked mac and cheese

I think there’s one basic truth in this world that we can all agree upon: macaroni and cheese is freaking awesome.  It’s like pizza-even when it’s bad, it’s still macaroni and cheese.

There’s a de facto rule in my family that every holiday meal must contain at least one pan of baked macaroni and cheese.  To not have it is a sin against God.  And taste.  And delicious flavor.

I do have a go-to recipe for mac-and-cheese that I like to pull out for such meals, and it never fails.  But tonight, I was on my own and I wanted to make something that would a) use up some leftover chicken from last night’s sammiches and 2)have all my carbs, veggies and protein in one pot.

I ended up combining influence from my usual recipe and from this baked penne with cheddar and leeks recipe from Bon Appetit, and threw in a few other things I had on hand. Continue reading

At the kofta, kofta cabana…

Josh and I are trying a new thing this month: not spending half our take home pay in food costs.  Radical, I know.  Especially when there’s only two of us.  Well, and Winston, but he doesn’t get people food, much to his dismay.  But between eating out fairly often (especially lunches during the work week, Sunday breakfasts at Afternoon Delight or Mark’s Midtown Coney Island and the frequent dinner out alone or with friends) and shopping at some not-so-wallet-friendly places just because they happen to be right across the street (coughwholefoodscough) and have an excellent meat counter, we do spend an inordinate amount of money on food.  That and we tend to not eat leftovers, and we buy expensive ingredients because well…we’re foodies.  We like to make and cook food of various types, and we get bored easily so…well, you can see how it lands us into trouble.

Where was I going with this?  Oh yeah.  Economizing.  Busch’s has ground sirloin on sale!  I adore ground sirloin.  So we bought a family pack of the stuff because hey, we eat beef pretty often (can you tell?), we have a ton of plastic baggies AND we have one of the greatest kitchen tools ever–a countertop scale.  We are in business.

And because I had this lovely pack of ground beef, I decided to try something new that would also utilize mostly ingredients I already had in the cupboards: beef kofta.

Kofta, or kefta, are basically Middle Eastern/South Asian meatballs which have variations numbering in the hundreds.  Often you’ll see them shaped like sausages and grilled on sticks.  That’s more or less what I was going for here.  Emboldened by the fact that kofta can be so varied, I didn’t worry about whether it’s truly authentic (I can assure you it’s not) and just focused on making something tasty, easy and quick.

Which brings us, finally, to the recipe. Continue reading

Salsa + Spaghetti = Salsagetti

Inspired by reading over Noelle’s entry about her delicious-looking salsa, I decided tonight to utilize the tomato-y bounty given forth to me by Josh’s beautiful heirloom variety tomato plants growing out on our deck.  But instead of a salsa, a fresh tomato sauce that I could mix in with the whole wheat linguine I got on sale at Busch’s yesterday, and serve it with the boneless skinless chicken breast I had thawing in the oven.  AND it would be a light healthy dish.  I love it when a plan comes together.

The smug foodie in me (I am writing this on a Mac after all) was also pretty proud of the fact that just about all the produce in this dish was locally grown, too.  The tomatoes, thyme, parsley and basil came from our own deck garden (we live on the third floor of an apartment building, but are lucky enough to have a big long deck which we line with various pots containing leafy and delicious products).  And the peppers, garlic and onion came from our farm share.  Delicious. Continue reading

A Ragù, of sorts

Today was a pasta kind of day.  You know those days.  It was rainy all morning and wet and even though it cleared up this afternoon, it just seemed like a day that was destined for noodles covered in sauce wearing some sort of delicious cheese.  We have pasta pretty often, though, and I wanted something not quite the same as the usual linguine or rigatoni with meatballs or meat sauce with ground beef.  So we went with a variation on the theme with a more traditional ragù.  Sometimes ragù is known as bolognese sauce, although traditional bolognese is made somewhat differently (served with tagliatelle or green lasagna and containing beef (sometimes pork or lamb), pancetta, onions, carrots, tomato paste, broth, red wine and sometimes cream or milk) and comes from Bologna, Italy.

So what did I do?

I went shopping.  I had to.  We were actually almost entirely out of pasta, which is very rare for us.  So on the way home from work, Josh and I headed to Busch’s and picked up a package of beef stew meat (I would have used a cheap cut of shoulder and chopped it up myself, but there were none), a can of crushed tomatoes, onions, a bag of shell pasta (conchiglie) and a small block of parmesan.  Including the cost of the pizza dough from yesterday to make garlic bread with, the entire dinner worked out to about $10 not including spices.  Woot!

Now, generally I can make a pasta dinner for the two of us in a half hour.  Tonight it was an hour and a half, and most of that was simmering the sauce to cook the stew meat long enough to let it start to melt into the sauce.  I’m a big fan of packaged beef stew meat for slowcooked meals.  It’s cheap, it’s delicious when properly seasoned, it responds well to long cooking times and hey, who doesn’t love the iron and the protein?  Vegetarians, that’s who. Continue reading

the kid in me

While Josh and I do love our culinary explorations of things like grilled pizza and Moroccan Spice Chicken, sometimes we like to just go back to a couple of our childhood faves:

Sloppy Joes and Kraft Mac and Cheese.

Now, Josh doesn’t let me doctor up the Cheesy Mac too far beyond adding a bit of broccoli or spinach, but I do have a variety of twists on sloppy joes, including adding in sliced garlic and onion, bell peppers, spinach, steak seasoning, sliced chili peppers, etc.  Tonight, though, we kept it simple (and I kept it open faced). Sometimes the oldies are goodies.

So a chicken gets dressed up for the ball…

Chicken meatballs.

Are like space.

They are my final frontier.  There is so much to explore with them and yet, I’ve only been so far as the moon.  Which is made of mozzarella.  Not green cheese.  Well maybe it gets moldy from time to time.

Anyway, it was an off-again-on-again rainy kind of day and it’s been kind of a tiring week, one of those weeks where I’ve been craving comfort foods all the time.  So far this week there’ve been hot dogs, barbecue, pizza, Hunan chicken and today, pasta.  Rigatoni.  With red sauce.  And chicken meatballs.

Continue reading

Pasta!

Rigatoni and meatballs, to be specific.  Mmm meatballs.  You may have guessed that I enjoy meatballs.  Or perhaps not.  There may have been no clues at all…Anyway, below is a pictoral history of what went down:

The Sauce

+   Continue reading

Baked Macaroni and Cheese

Every family has their favorite dishes, things that appear at every get-together and every holiday.  My family has baked macaroni and cheese.  We’re connosieurs of it, really.  Don’t get me wrong; deep down, the poor kid in me still loves something about Kraft easy mac, and the grown-up in me still likes to experiment with my own homemade version of the stuff, but really, truly and absolutely there is no substitute for a good, hearty backed macaroni and cheese casserole with tons of gooey cheese and a good crispy crust.

This is the version I make.  I got it from Tyler Florence (the man is a god amongst mortal chefs) and I make it with or without the bacon (depends on whether my vegetarian mom is partaking) altho Josh will say that it’s not the same without bacon.  It’s a pretty easy recipe to scale, and I’ve made it for as many as 25-30 people.  It always gets rave reviews.

Continue reading

Beef Pesto Pasta

As of early yesterday afternoon, I’d had no real plan for dinner.  I’d bought some beef stirfry meat at Busch’s earlier, intending on putting something together for lunches during the week, but had nothing specific in mind.  By late afternoon, though, I’d slowly started putting some pieces together.  I had stirfry meat, ok.  I had pasta, several varieties.  I had spinach leftover from our farm share, and garlic scapes.  A search of the freezer revealed some shelled edamame.  And then I was sitting on the couch looking out at my deck when I realized my basil plant was getting rather tall and needed to be cut down….pesto!  So things all just sort of came together.

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Linguine with Lemon, Swiss Chard and Chicken Meatballs

Linguine with Lemon, Swiss Chard and Chicken Meatballs

So this was tonight’s meal.  It was sort of a riff off a couple meals I’ve made before, a combination of  my “pasta with sausage and kale,” which was inspired by this recipe, and my chicken meatballs, which I love.  Normally my chicken meatballs are made with ground chicken breast, and sometimes with a bit of spicy pork sausage thrown in; this time, I used ground chicken thigh and hot Italian chicken sausage.  I wasn’t as big a fan of the meatballs, but Josh liked them.

Continue reading