Pesto

It's not too late to enjoy fresh, homemade pesto, with fresh basil still available at the farmers market. It's the perfect foundation for a variety of meals--pasta, being an obvious one, but it's also great slathered on bread and even mixed into risotto.

Basic pesto is a simple blend of olive oil, basil, garlic, nuts, salt and parmesan cheese. Some recipes will call for other things, such as parsley in addition to the basil. And I found an America's Test Kitchen recipe that includes mayonnaise and spinach, but personally, I like to keep this simple, letting the basil and cheese be the star players with the nuts providing a savory side note.

The traditional nut in pesto is pine nuts; however, other nuts can be used too. I tried making it with walnuts and I noticed no major difference in flavor. With pine nuts becoming more expensive lately, this might be an attractive substitute.

In seeking a solid basic recipe for pesto, I consulted the usual suspects. Mark Bittman has a nice, simple recipe, although when I made it, I thought it was too oily. However, I do like that his recipe calls for adding some of the oil gradually with the food processor running, since the oil emulsifies the pesto, smoothing it out. Julee Rosso and Sheila Lukin's The New Basics Cookbook employs a similar technique and uses less oil, but doesn't call for nuts or cheese, treating these as optional add ins rather than essential ingredients. America's Test Kitchen's New Best Recipe cookbook calls for bruising the basil first (sounds interesting, but potentially not necessary) and toasting the nuts in a pan (a good idea).

Basic Pesto

2 cups loosely packed basil leaves
1/3 cup olive oil
1 garlic clove, smashed
Pinch of salt
3 tbsp. nuts (pine nuts or walnuts, pan-toasted if desired)
1/2 cup grated parmigiano-reggiano cheese

Place basil, half the olive oil, garlic, salt and nuts in a food processor. Process until well combined, scraping down the sides a few times as needed. Turn the processor on and add the remaining olive oil slowly through the feed tube. Transfer mixture to a bowl and stir in the cheese.

Pasta with Salt Pork, Kale, Green Garlic and Caramelized Onion

Two thing went wrong while making this dish. Not wrong like "bad," but just not what I'd planned. That can be both the beauty and the curse of cooking: it often doesn't turn out how you expect, but that's not always a bad thing. As such, it's often best to keep expectations at bay and let the dish go where it will go.

In this case, it all turned out fine actually. The first "mishap" was that I forgot what salt cured pork is. I picked up a package of it at Whole Foods thinking it was slab bacon. Then when I opened the package to slice the pork into cubes I instantly realized my mistake. Salt pork looks like bacon, but it has a different flavor. And significantly, it isn't smoked, so that nice smokiness you get from bacon (which I was hoping for here) is missing. The lack of smoke odor was instantly noticeable.

The second issue was what happened with the yogurt. In the past, I've made pasta dishes where you add half n half or sour cream at the end to make a nice creamy sauce. I thought I'd try using Greek Yogurt instead. I even did some internet searches that showed people do in fact use yogurt in pasta sauces. Whether it was because I used nonfat yogurt or that I continued to cook it after adding it, I'm not sure, but the yogurt separated and thus added no creaminess to my dish. Instead, there were little tangy crumbles strewn throughout.

I was able to address both of these issues though, and in the end, the dish was quite tasty. For the salt pork, I improved bacon flavor by adding two teaspoons of liquid hickory smoke flavor. For the yogurt, I added half a cup of reserved pasta water (after the pasta had finished cooking). Neither of the ingredients that didn't work as I planned were a failure: the "smoked" salt cured pork had a nice meaty flavor and the yogurt still gave the dish some added tang. And the half cup of pasta water that I've learned is always good to set aside before draining the pasta ensured the dish wasn't too dry.

Pasta with Salt Pork, Kale, Green Garlic and Caramelized Onion

1 lb. penne pasta
1/4 cup coarsely chopped walnuts
1 tbsp. olive oil
1/2 large sweet onion (or 1 medium size), sliced into thin (1/8-inch thick) 1-inch strips
1/2 lb. salt cured pork, cut into 1/2-inch thick cubes
2 tsp. liquid smoke flavor
5 green garlic heads, white part and tender green part minced
Fresh-ground black pepper
1/2 tsp. dried oregano
10 kale leaves, stems removed and chopped into 2-inch pieces
1/2 cup pasta water (water reserved from cooking pasta)
3/4 cup nonfat Greek yogurt
Parmigano-reggiano, to taste

1. Bring a large pot of salted water to boil. Cook pasta to package directions for al dente. Reserve 1/2 cup of the water from the cooked pasta. Drain pasta and set aside.

2. Heat a small frying pan over medium-low heat. Toast walnuts until fragrant and lightly browned.

3. Heat a large deep-sided skillet over medium heat (or perhaps a touch below medium). Add olive oil and onions. Cook, stirring frequently about 15 minutes until onions are quite soft but not brown (reduce heat if they start to brown). Add pork, green garlic, smoke flavor and pepper and continue cooking until pork has rendered fat and starts to brown around the edges. Season with organo. Add kale to pan and cook until wilted, about 5 minutes. Stir in pasta water and yogurt. Remove heat and toss with cooked pasta. Serve topped with parmigiano-reggiano.

Rigatoni with Sausage and Swiss Chard

I use Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything app a lot, but I rarely use my other iPhone cooking app: Mario Batali Cooks! Compared with Bittman's, Batali's app has far, far fewer recipes and a fussy interface. That aside, Batali is a well-known chef and restauranteur, so I decided to dive in and find a recipe I liked.

His Pasta con la Bietola looked promising. "Bietola" is Italian for Swiss Chard, and this simple dish made with whole-wheat rigatoni, greens and fresh bread crumbs is seasonal and hearty.

I decided to add some meat, so I picked up a couple of Italian chicken sausages from Whole Foods. Their chicken sausage is really quite good, as good as their regular pork Italian sausage. These are not those cardboard-y pre-cooked kind with little red flecks posing as sundried tomatoes. These are real sausages made of raw ingredients and spiced with fennel seed. I use them all the time and they are great.

Figuring out how to make the fresh bread crumbs was a little challenging. The app doesn't include a recipe for it (and I couldn't find one online, despite seeing fresh bread crumbs in other Batali recipes). 

There is a video though, and the process is pretty easy: cut the crusts off half a small loaf of Italian bread (save the other half for something else, such as eating with olive oil), tear bread into pieces, pulse in a food processor until you've achieved an ideal crumb size, then toast the crumbs in a dry frying pan over medium heat until the crumbs turn dark brown (but not burnt). 

After browning the sausage in a little olive oil, I added the vegetables--red onion and the chopped stalks of the Swiss chard, which I figured could use the additional cooking time with the onion rather than with the chard leaves. 

Adding the chard leaves to the pan was a bit of a challenge, despite making this in my largest deep-sided saute pan. In just a short time though, the leaves cooked down to a manageable size. Batali's recipe calls for chopping the leaves into 1/4-inch strips, but I just ripped them by hand and tossed them in.

Rigatoni with Sausage and Swiss Chard

Adapted from Mario Batali's Pasta con la Bietola

1/2 small loaf Italian bread
1 lb. whole wheat rigatoni

2 tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil

6-8 oz. mild Italian chicken sausage

1 medium red onion, halved and sliced

1 lb. Swiss chart, stems separated and diced, leaves torn into 1- to 2-inch pieces
3 garlic cloves, thinly sliced
Salt and fresh-ground black pepper to taste
Parmigiano-reggiano

1. Cut the crusts off the bread, tear into large chunks and pulse in food processor to reach desired crumb size. Heat a medium frying pan over medium heat and toast bread crumbs until browned (should be a dark brown). Set aside.

2. Bring a large pot of water to boil, add salt and cook pasta two minutes short of package directions for al dente. Reserve 2 cups of pasta water, drain pasta and set aside.

3. Heat olive oil in a large saute pan. Add sausage and brown, breaking up with a wooden spoon. Add onion, garlic and chopped chard stems and saute until softened, about 5 minutes. Add swiss chard leaves and cook for about 12-15 minutes until the chard is very tender, stirring occasionally. Add pasta to saute pan and a cup of reserved pasta water. Toss thoroughly to combine and add the other cup of water if needed. Season with salt and fresh ground pepper and serve topped with toasted breadcrumbs and shavings of parmigiano-reggiano.

Farfalle with Pancetta and Peas

Fresh peas and spring go together like, well, two peas in a pod. Peas also go nicely with bacon, as well as pancetta, which is Italian bacon, similar to the American version but made a little differently.

This dish is like a lighter version of pasta carbonara, the creamy pasta dish with bacon and eggs. It has a touch of cream, but the pasta is only lightly sauced.

Monitor the peas while cooking to ensure they do not turn gray, which signals they're overcooked.

Use a vegetable peeler to make large, thin shavings from a block of parmigano-reggiano

Farfalle with Pancetta and Peas

1 lb. farfalle (bowtie) pasta
3 oz. pancetta, cut into lardons (thin strips)
2 shallots, minced
Olive oil (if needed)
2 garlic cloves, minced
16 oz. fresh peas
1 cup white wine
2 tbsp. heavy cream
Salt and fresh-ground black pepper to taste
2 tbsp. fresh parsley, chopped
parmigiano-reggiano shavings

1. Boil pasta in salted water to al dente according to package directions. Drain and set aside.

2. Heat a large frying pan over medium heat. And pancetta and cook until browned a crisp. Remove with a slotted spoon, reserving about 1 tbsp. of rendered fat in the pan (add olive oil if needed). Add shallots and garlic to pan. Saute until softened, 3-5 minutes. Add peas and wine and saute about 3 minutes. Season with salt and pepper. Add cream and cooked pancetta. Cook for another couple minutes to heat through and thicken sauce.

3. Pour pancetta-pea sauce over pasta and stir to mix. Spoon into bowls and top with parsley and parmesan shavings.

Risotto with Sausage, Parsnips and Kale

This dish is a slight modification of this week's Risotto with Parsnips and Green recipe from the New York Times that I was excited about Wednesday. It didn't disappoint, delivering a nice mix of flavors from the sweetness of the parsnips and the bitter kale.

I find the tricky thing with risotto is getting the texture just right. Cook it too fast and the rice will be tough. Cook it too long and you end up with a gooey, squishy mess. The texture of this risotto turned out perfectly, the grains al dente with starchy-tangy creaminess lightly enveloping them. I used a dutch oven to cook the rice. In my experience, dutch ovens cook hotter than other pans, so I reduced the recipe's cooking temperature.

First quibble with the recipe as written is the cooking time, which I find that recipes often under estimate. It says "about 40 minutes," which is not enough time. Working as efficiently as possible, this took me an hour. To help with timing, start by preheating the oven and then prepping the parsnips for roasting. Then, while you're waiting for the oven to heat up, boil the water and prep the kale. Don't worry if the parsnips look a little burnt around the edges (as shown below). They tasted great and even the photo with the NYT recipe showed them like that.

Second quibble is that the recipe says to cook the kale in the boiling water "very briefly." What does that mean? I decided it was going to be enough time for me to stir the kale once, get the colander out the cupboard and put it in the sink and stir the kale again before draining it. That seemed to do the trick as it turned out great.

The Italian sausage I added provided a nice meaty element, complimenting the other vegetables, as well as tying the dish to my spinach-fennel salad (since Italian sausage has fennel seed). I added the sausage at the beginning of the step to sauté the sage and garlic. I drained off most of the rendered sausage fat, but since there was still some fat in the pan, I omitted the 1 tablespoon of olive oil from step four. I kept the butter though, since that's an important flavor in the dish.

To serve with this, I prepared a simple salad of baby spinach and fennel with a lemon-honey dressing. I used a mandolin on the lowest setting (1/16-inch) to thinly slice the fennel bulb. For the dressing, I combined lemon juice with honey, dried thyme, salt, pepper and extra-virgin olive oil.

Risotto with Sausage, Parsnips and Kale

(Adapted from The New York Times' Risotto with Parsnips and Greens)

Cooking time: About 1 hour

1/2 pound parsnips (about four)

Salt and fresh-ground black pepper to taste

2 tsp plus 2 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil

1/2 pound kale (about 3 cups chopped)

1 sweet onion, finely diced

1 1/2 cups arborio rice

1/4 cup dry white wine (I used sauvignon blanc)

4 cups unsalted chicken broth

1/2 pound mild Italian sausage, removed from casings (could chicken or pork)

2 tbsp butter

3 garlic cloves, minced

8 sage leaves, roughly chopped

1/2 cup grated parmigiano-reggiano cheese

1. Heat oven to 400 degrees. Peel the parsnips, quarter them lengthwise, and remove the tough core with a paring knife. Cut into 1/2-inch random shapes, put in a roasting pan, season with salt and coat with 2 teaspoons of olive oil. Roast until tender and lightly browned, about 15 to 20 minutes. Remove from the oven and set aside.

2. Bring a pot of salted water to a boil over high heat. Remove the stems from the kale and cut it into 1/2-inch-wide ribbons. Cook kale very briefly in the boiling water (about 1 minute). Drain, cool and squeeze dry. Set aside.

3. Heat 2 tablespoons olive oil in a dutch oven over medium heat. Add the onion, season with salt and pepper, and cook until softened, about 5 minutes. Add the rice and stir together with the onions until the onions are beginning to brown, about 2 minutes. Add the white wine and cook until it evaporates (doesn't take very long). Add 2 cups broth and reduce the heat just slightly to a brisk simmer. Cook for 5 to 6 minutes, stirring well every minute or so. When the broth is absorbed, add another 1 cup of broth and continue to cook for another 5 minutes. Stir in the last cup of broth and cook for another 5 minutes, until the rice is cooked, but the grains are still firm. Taste and adjust the seasoning, adding another splash of broth if necessary. Turn off the heat.

4. While the rice is cooking, brown sausage in a large frying pan over medium heat, breaking up with a wooden spoon as it cooks. When the sausage is browned, add the butter, garlic and sage and let sizzle without browning, about 1 minute. Add the roasted parsnips and chopped greens, season lightly with salt and pepper, and stir to coat and heat through, about 2 minutes more.

5. Gently fold the cooked sausage and vegetables into the rice with the parmesan cheese and serve.

Spinach-Fennel Salad with Honey-Lemon Dressing

By A. Huddleston

(serves four)

5 oz. baby spinach, washed

1/2 fennel bulb, thinly sliced

1 tbsp lemon juice

1 tsp honey

1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil

Salt and pepper to taste

1. Combine spinach and fennel in a salad bowl.

2. Whisk together remaining ingredients and toss with vegetables.