Eyewitness Cook
Pasta with garlicky peas and roasted mushrooms
It's one of my absolute standbys, it's a dinner that's half vegetables, and it's delicious
After my piece yesterday extolling the pleasures and creative possibilities of cooking and eating vegetables, I got a message from a brilliant chef — one whose food haunts my dreams — asking, “An Achatz dish as an illustration for home cooks?”
Fair enough! I’d trotted out the dish in question, by Grant Achatz of the restaurant Alinea, to highlight the level of excitement a vegetable dish can attain. But it’s a 20-element composition involving tomatoes, making balloons of mozzarella cheese, spirals of molasses and saffron, and, well, 17 other things, and it’s hardly the kind of thing most people would/could/should attempt. (Not that the intrepid blogger Carol Blymire hasn’t tried.) And the thing with pointing toward creative geniuses is that it’s dangerous — one person’s inspiration is another’s totally oppressive, intimidating, why-should-I-bother wall.
So the dish below (one of my absolute standbys) is not going to win any awards for creativity or highbrow excellence, but that’s kind of the point. It uses very unfashionable supermarket white mushrooms and even more unfashionable frozen peas. I mean, it’s just pasta with peas and mushrooms. But it uses a searing technique to bring out flavor in the mushrooms and pairs that with a gentle warming-through in garlicky butter to keep the peas light and sweet, a complementary range of flavors and depths. It’s also a dinner that is almost fully half vegetable by weight, and will be happily eaten by anyone short of those who literally run at the sight of green in their food. That feels pretty creative to me.
A note about the frozen pea: I love fresh peas, but to be honest, peas lose their sugar and tenderness so quickly that unless you’re getting them the same day out of the garden, they can be all mealy and boo-hoo. (And we’re still a while from pea season, at any rate.) A decent brand of frozen pea, though, can serve you well; frozen within hours of being picked, they keep many of their fresh charms.
Pasta with peas and roasted mushrooms
Serves 3-4 as a main course
Ingredients
- 8 ounces white mushrooms
- Salt and white pepper, to taste
- Olive oil, as needed (a couple tablespoons)
- 3 cloves garlic
- 3 tablespoons butter (you can use olive oil instead, but butter makes it … special)
- Pinch saffron (very optional, but very nice)
- 8 ounces pasta, some manner of short shape (bowties, pennette, you get the picture. Or saffron malloreddus, if you really want to be a baller.)
- 10 oz box frozen peas (or fresh, of course, if they’re in season)
- ½ cup white wine
- 1½ ounces parmesan cheese, grated fine
- Chopped parsley, thyme, basil, rosemary or mint, to taste (optional, but nice)
Directions
- Preheat oven to 425. Meanwhile, set three quarts of water on to boil, and salt it so it tastes nearly like sea water.
- Rub the mushrooms clean of dirt with a towel or paper towel. Cut off the stems if they’re long (but use them). Quarter the mushrooms if they’re quarter-sized, and cut them in sixths if they’re half-dollar sized. Toss them in a bowl with salt, pepper and enough olive oil to coat lightly.
- Heat a heavy pan, large enough to fit all the mushrooms comfortably in one layer, over high heat. Add about a tablespoon of oil to the pan, and when it’s hot enough to shimmer but not quite smoke, add the mushrooms. Let sear briefly, then transfer to oven.
- Cut off half a clove of garlic and mince it very fine. Reserve it. Chop the rest, to somewhere between the size of a pea and a BB. In a pan large enough to hold all the peas, mushrooms and pasta, melt the butter over low heat and add the chopped garlic. Let it get friendly; you’re not trying to brown the garlic, but slowly infuse the butter with its flavor. Add saffron, if using. If the garlic starts to brown, take the pan off the heat.
- Check on the mushrooms. Give the pan a toss. You’re looking for nice browning and, eventually, for them to have cooked and shrunken enough to be almost chewy, about 20-25 minutes total. Put back in oven and continue to roast.
- Cook pasta in the boiling, salted water.
- When the pasta is nearly done, put the garlic-butter pan back over high heat. Add the peas and heat through with a few tablespoons of pasta water. Season with salt and plenty of pepper. Take the mushrooms from the oven and deglaze the pan with the wine, stirring to dissolve all the brown bits, and bring to a boil to cook off the alcohol. Add to the peas. Stir in the raw minced garlic and herbs, if using.
- Drain the pasta once finished and add to the peas. Toss all together, stir in the cheese, taste and adjust seasoning with salt, pepper and possibly a splash of olive oil, butter or more pasta water if it seems a little dry. Serve right away.
Francis Lam is Features Editor at Gilt Taste, provides color commentary for the Cooking Channel show Food(ography), and tweets at @francis_lam. More Francis Lam.
How to make kale and spinach chips
Dark leafy greens are sometimes a tough sell. This is the crispy approach
It’s been decades since the time in my life when I wore T-shirts with slogans and names of bands, but I do have two still kicking around my dresser. One is pure rock ‘n’ roll, and the other says, “Eat more kale.”
I get that kale can be a tough sell. It’s been maligned for decades, in a nation not known for its love of vegetables, as a deeply unreconstructed vegetable. Scary-dark green, way tougher than lettuce and vaguely bitter, it was long relegated to being a frilly little decoration on fruit plates and supermarket fish counters. My best friend, in fact, grew up working a part-time job at a supermarket fish counter. He was 24 when he found out you can actually eat the stuff he used to tuck into the ice around the salmon steaks.
Continue Reading CloseFrancis Lam is Features Editor at Gilt Taste, provides color commentary for the Cooking Channel show Food(ography), and tweets at @francis_lam. More Francis Lam.
How to make potsticker dumplings, Mama Yang style
Yes, it's a project. Yes, they're cheap to buy. But what's better than a party where the guests all get to cook?
I’ll be straight with you: I’m not going to try to convince you to spend hours and hours to make these potstickers. After all, they are a food that, if you live in a city with a Chinatown of any size, you can probably get for 20 cents apiece. When it comes to making dumplings at home, it’s a choice you have to come to on your own.
Because they are no joke when it comes to effort. You have to chop and squeeze and mix the filling, cooking off bits to taste for the correct seasoning until you get it right. You have to knead the dough and roll out dozens if not hundreds of skins. You have to stuff them, form them, pleat them and then, eventually, you get to cook and maybe even eat them. (This is why they are a distinguished weapon in the ever-full quivers of mothers who tend to smother with kindness.)
Continue Reading CloseFrancis Lam is Features Editor at Gilt Taste, provides color commentary for the Cooking Channel show Food(ography), and tweets at @francis_lam. More Francis Lam.
Making stock, part two: Fish and seafood
I love this stuff. Great flavor, more versatile than you think, and done in under an hour
Welcome back, class. When we last met, we spoke of the proper and informal techniques of fundamental meat and vegetable stocks. Forgive me for the professorial tone today, but I find it difficult to communicate about stock any other way, because making stock is SO OLD SCHOOL. Boom!
Anyway, when I admitted that I actually don’t often make stock the proper way at home anymore — I mean, when am I going to start simmering bones eight hours before dinner? — I did withhold a little. I will make seafood and fish stocks fresh, because they can be in and out in under an hour — under half an hour if you really want. And I’m never too worried about what I’m using them for. Obviously they would be great for seafood sauces or soups, but if I want to make, say, beef stew and have only shrimp stock? I’m going to make beef stew with shrimp stock, and it’s going to taste great. Don’t be afraid to mix and match. Most times, if the stock is good, it’ll taste good in the end.
Continue Reading CloseFrancis Lam is Features Editor at Gilt Taste, provides color commentary for the Cooking Channel show Food(ography), and tweets at @francis_lam. More Francis Lam.
How to make stock the right way, the wrong way, and when it matters
It's the foundation of your cooking, so it'd better be great. But don't let the perfect be the enemy of the tasty
Sign up for any culinary school, open up any How To Be a Chef in 800 Easy Pages kind of cookbook, talk to any classically trained chef, and the first thing they will tell you is to learn how to make stock.
Stock is the foundation of cooking, they will say. It is the base for all your soups and all your sauces; it’s what you use to stew and braise, what you use to thin out liquids and purees that are too thick, or, reduced, it’s what you add to them for more flavor. Used to poach delicate fish and meat, it makes those foods magnitudes more flavorful.
Continue Reading CloseFrancis Lam is Features Editor at Gilt Taste, provides color commentary for the Cooking Channel show Food(ography), and tweets at @francis_lam. More Francis Lam.
Turnip sauerkraut — turning the humble into the spectacular
Make turnip sauerkraut. You heard me. Hey, where are you going? Come back, this stuff is great! Really!
My special ladyfriend is fond of repeating something she heard once: that the two signs of senility in men are comparison shopping and pickling. And despite the fact that I now live in Brooklyn, the Look-At-Me-I’m-Pickling capital of the developed world, who can honestly be excited about senility and sauerkraut?
So it’s a mystery even to me that I curled up in bed one night with Sandor Katz’s wildly influential pickling how-to Wild Fermentation, aka The Guide to Living Comfortably with Memory Loss. And I woke up the next morning so excited to shred and salt turnips for an unusual sauerkraut that I was there, in my kitchen, doing it in my shorts. Pants would come later. That is probably not a good sign. But the results, I can say after a healthy munch this morning, are definitely worth it.
Continue Reading CloseFrancis Lam is Features Editor at Gilt Taste, provides color commentary for the Cooking Channel show Food(ography), and tweets at @francis_lam. More Francis Lam.
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