pasta – Page 2 – The Kitchen Illiterate

Creamy Mushroom and Chicken Pasta

I think for a minute there I started to go into hibernation. The grey and the cold and the snow, well, let’s just say it makes me feel awfully unmotivated. The lure of True Blood and Cougar Town, and of simple dinners consisting of nothing but rice and roasted vegetables, has sadly left this space bereft of anything new. And with holiday travel, and holiday planning, I guess writing has been pushed to the back of my mind. I’m sorry. I hope I didn’t leave you too hungry.

The thing is, too, that I’m starting to feel I’ve outgrown this space. More than a few people have mentioned to me that I’m not exactly a kitchen illiterate anymore. It’s been hard to find a way to write about what I’m doing in the kitchen these days in a way that fits in here. So I’ve been hard at work (ok, when I manage to get off the couch) creating a new site for my new food blogging project. I’ll definitely share it all when it’s ready, but never fear, I’ll still be sharing recipes one the internets, even if it’s not right here.

In the meantime, I wanted to share this delicious pasta dish I’ve been kind of obsessing over lately. I kept my distance from the rich, creamy pastas for most of the last year, but when it started to get really cold again, I was craving heavy cream something serious. And when I came up with this sauce, it was all over. This is really something special.
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Pasta with Sausage and Lentils

Today it is rainy and grey and cold in Walla Walla, and I think I have to accept that it is well and truly fall. That’s not so bad, though, because I still have a huge bowl of tomatoes on my kitchen counter, and also, I really love fall. It is my favorite season. The air is crisp, and usually smells a little like wood smoke. The clothes are fantastic, all sweaters and wool and light scarves. And the food, well. I love summer produce, but I really love fall food. Bring on the slow cooked meats and roasted squash and hearty, warm comfort food.
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Pasta Salad with Salmon, Cabbage, and Carrots

Last week, I broke out the grill for the first time in a year and cooked up some lovely salmon fillets. Being as I was only making dinner for one, I ended up with more grilled salmon than I could eat in one night, and the next day I used the rest to put together a huge bowl of this lovely pasta salad. Well, it ended up being more pasta salad than I could eat in one night, and I had pasta salad to last me many days. And I got a little sick of it after it became my fourth lunch in a row, so I might recommend that if you make this pasta salad, you have more than one person around to eat it. Because I do think you should make this pasta salad. It’s pasta salad season, after all, and this one is unique.
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Soba Noodles with Bok Choy and Tahini

When I got my first bundle of bok choy from my CSA, I started searching around for new ways to prepare this Asian green. I must admit, I’ve been getting a wee bit tired of garlic-sauteed greens and rice, so I wanted something unique. Unfortunately, the Great Google turned up many, many of the same recipe: bok choy sauteed or steamed, and seasoned with toasted sesame oil and soy sauce, with some ginger thrown in for extra flavor. Of course, that sounds delicious, and I made it once or twice, but when I wanted to branch out, it took me awhile to find something different.

I’m glad I searched so diligently, because this Tahini sauce has become one of my new favorites. It’s reminiscent of a peanut sauce, but a little more bitter. It’s easy as heck, but could probably be fancied up, too. And it is filling and delicious.
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Spicy Shrimp with Buckwheat Soba Noodles

It’s always amusing for me to go back to the early archives of this site and realize how little I knew about cooking. And I posted everything, no matter how lackluster the final product. A lot of these early culinary endeavors, despite being executed poorly, do hold some promise, and I’ve been having fun re-creating them and trying to improve where I went wrong back in the day. One of these improvements turned out so much better, and was so easy, that I suspect I’ll be making it more often: The Spicy Shrimp and Red Onion Pasta of 2007 became the Spicy Shrimp with Buckwheat Soba Noodles you see here, and they were much more palatable this time around. It was all about the balance of ingredients, and using the right kind of noodles.
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Spicy Spaghetti with Fennel

From the moment I saw this recipe in January’s issue of Bon Appetit it went on my list. I don’t usually eat a lot of fennel. It doesn’t occur to me to pick it up. But the photo was so alluring, and I’m a sucker for a big ol’ bowl of pasta. It sounded different from my normal cream-heavy pasta dishes, so I had to try it. And wowza, it was amazing. A touch of thick-cut bacon, fennel braised long enough to become silky and rich, and just enough spice to keep things interesting, and I was hooked. You probably will be, too.
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Pasta with Creamy Ham and Mustard Sauce

This is one of those dinners that I threw together in an attempt to use up some of the things in my refrigerator and I am so pleased with that I’m adding it to the repertoire of regularly weeknight dinners. Easy, fast, and super delicious, and even better, it smells exactly like a ham and cheese sandwich, though there is no cheese to speak of here. Just onions, ham, cream, oregano, and a bit of dijon mustard. This is one of those meals that makes me think I shouldn’t have figured out how to make an easy and fast cream sauce, because this kind of deliciousness should probably require more work.
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Creamy Squash Rigatoni

Whew. After a whirlwind week in San Diego with my family for Thanksgiving, it was kind of strange to come back to my small, quiet, still little house in Walla Walla. And also, it was cold. It is decidedly winter. And while I’m so not a fan of wintery things like frost and being cold, I am a huge fan of wintery things like squash and pot roast and sweaters and being cozy in my little house while the wind howls away outside. This pasta is perfect for that. It is also very rich. When I cooked this it was probably the first time I served myself dinner and couldn’t finish it. And not because it’s not good. It’s great, and I heartily enjoyed the leftovers. But be warned: It is rich. It might be best to serve this in small portions, with a crisp and light side salad.
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Cheesy Turkey Manicotti

Lately I’ve had quite a thing for meals I can portion out and freeze in little individual servings. This Turkey Manicotti is exactly that. I thought it was just as delicious defrosted and carried to work in a little plastic container as it was when I first made it. In fact, I thought maybe it was even better. Maybe the flavors had more time to develop and become one, though I’m not entirely sure that can actually happen in a freezer. Either way, this is an excellent meal to make on a weekend and freeze for those evenings when you just don’t want to cook or those mornings when you can’t find anything else in the cupboard to bring for lunch.
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Chicken Piccata Pasta

Man, I love pasta. I eat pasta at least three times a week, and not just with red sauce. I can take anything in my refrigerator and make some kind of pasta-based dinner around it. And recently, while flipping through Giada De Laurentiis’s Everyday Italian, I decided that nearly all of the recipes in this book would be more interesting if they were turned into pasta dishes. So I decided to start with Chicken Piccata.

Giada’s Chicken Piccata recipe is in the chapter on Cutlets. I’m assuming it’s meant to be served as a big slab of meat, maybe with a side of polenta and some kind of vegetable. But as you can probably tell if you’ve been following this blog for any length of time, I’m not really a big-slab-of-meat kind of girl. I tend to prefer meals in which all of the important food components can be mixed together and served in a bowl, which is probably why pasta is such a favorite. So I decided to add some zucchini to the mix and turn this big-slab-of-meat meal into a quick, easy, and tasty pasta dinner.
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