walnut-lemon sauce for pasta

On Tuesday night, I made a very simple pasta sauce that is one of our favorites. I found it in Real Simple magazine last fall and have made it several times since. All it requires is olive oil, walnuts, parsley, and lemon juice. We had fresh parsley from the CSA box and we almost always have the other ingredients on hand.

My tip for chopping fresh herbs such as parsley or basil is to place the leaves in a small bowl and, holding the kitchen shears vertically, snip them into little pieces. It's much easier than chopping the herbs with a knife and only takes a few seconds.

The little bowl pictured is one of these Williams-Sonoma stainless steel prep bowls. They come in sets of four with plastic lids. I have eight of these bowls altogether and they are in constant rotation. We use them for everything - salad dressing, cinnamon sugar, storage of small amounts of leftovers - and they are particular useful for dishes with many ingredients, like stir fry.

For the sauce, which only takes a few minutes, you just need to heat a tablespoon or two of olive oil over medium heat and then add the walnuts (one small handful per serving), stirring frequently until they are nicely toasted. Follow your nose for this - when you can smell a nice strong walnut smell, they are done. Quickly add the parsley, stir, remove from heat, and add a dash of lemon juice (most of the liquid will instantly steam off, but the lemony flavor will remain).

After the lemon juice, add the cooked pasta of your choice to the pan, stir to toss, and serve. I always use ravioli with this sauce. In this case, I used plain cheese ravioli from the freezer. This sauce is particularly excellent with homemade pumpkin ravioli, but that's another recipe for another post.

We ate this ravioli with a simple salad (romaine from week 2, curly lettuce from week 3, carrots, and green grapes). I always eat my salad first so if I get full, at least I got my veggies in.

Out of the Box, Week 3

Clockwise from top left: chard, garlic scapes, sugar snap peas, parsley, lettuce, zucchini, kai-lan.

I had planned to stir-fry the kohlrabi in the middle of last week, but when I heard we might be getting some bok choy in box #3, I decided to hold off and use them together. It looks like we ended up with kai-lan instead, but that's just as good for stir-frying.

The garlic scape, like the kohlrabi, is exactly why I wanted a CSA. Not only had I never bought garlic scapes, I'd never even heard of them. I think they are strangely beautiful. If I were a floral designer, I'd be sticking these babies in arrangements whenever I could get my hands on them. Here is a nice little article about them. You can use them however you would use garlic, steam them and serve them with butter, or make pesto with them. I decided to split my share in half, using some for the stir fry and some for this spinach pesto recipe, which will also help me use up the last of that gigantic bag of spinach.

Here are all my stir-fry ingredients, ready and waiting while the fire heats the wok. In the colander are most of this week's sugar snap peas. I have cubed tofu and bottled oyster sauce, for convenience. Some frozen corn and a shredded carrot add color. The leaves are from the kohlrabi and kai-lan. In the little prep bowls, clockwise from top left, are garlic scapes and the white scallion parts, kohlrabi, and kai-lan stems.

Less than ten minutes later, dinner was ready. I had previously made scallion pancakes with the last of the bunch from week two. I used the recipe from the New Moosewood Cookbook. These were a little tough. I may have kneaded the dough too much. I baked these, instead of frying them, in a small nod to nutrition.

Overall the stir fry was tasty and I really liked that I got to use so many new vegetables in it. We had plenty left over for today's lunch, too, and even a little more for tomorrow's bentos.

Last but not least, we enjoyed a tasty glass of cheap bubbly to celebrate the fact that I am now fully self-employed!