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.

spinach, two ways

After a couple of days of salads for dinner, I was ready for something a little different. I decided to tackle the rather large bag of spinach. I'm not a huge spinach eater; I do use frozen spinach a lot in the winter when fresh, local greens aren't available, but given the option, I'll usually choose other greens. The one exception is this amazing pomegranate and spinach salad recipe from The Armenian Table, an excellent cookbook that I received as a Christmas present from my (Armenian) mother-in-law. That salad was so wonderful I must have made it about ten times in three weeks, and I went through withdrawal when the pomegranates disappeared from the grocery store shelves.

Anyway, back to the spinach - I decided to use some of it for a pasta dish. I sauteed it with some onions and garlic in a little olive oil, then tossed it with penne and (for lack of ricotta) cottage cheese. A little grated asiago on top finished it off. It was an okay supper, but not quite as good as I expected it to be. I think next time it would be better with feta. (Doesn't that sound like a tagline? "Everything's betta with feta!")

We had some leftover, so I put it in our bentos the next day, along with a simple salad (lettuce, carrots, walnuts, dried cranberries) and some turkey pepperoni for protein.

By the next night, Thursday, I was really sick of salads and terrified of how much spinach remained. I decided it could only be handled with cheese. Bring on the calzones!

Whole-wheat pizza dough from the Coop is reasonably healthy but probably did little to counteract the cheesezilla action as seen in this picture. Four different cheeses combined to make this one tasty calzone: mozzarella, provolone, ricotta, and feta. At least they were all low-fat cheeses, but the cumulative fat factor = not so great. Still, there was (some) spinach in there. We added a little marinara for dipping and had one deliciously cheesy meal.

Now for the bad news: we STILL have spinach left from week one, and today, in box number two, we received more. Lots more. Probably like five pounds more. And there's only two of us (that are human). Unless Ashley the cat takes a liking to fresh greens, I think we're stuck with a spinach surplus.

salad, take two

Now this salad, while similar to the last one, was much more satisfying. In fact, it was downright hearty. I was so stuffed that I didn't even eat dessert (a VERY RARE occurrence).

I used the enormous mutant lettuce as a base, and topped it with celery, carrots, Granny Smith apples, cheddar cheese, dried cranberries, and walnuts. It's dressed with my mustard vinaigrette, as usual. This time I shredded the carrots using our Salad Shooter. It's one of those weird little gadgets that I probably wouldn't have purchased on my own, but we received one as a gift from my sister-in-law and it has turned out to be one of the best gifts I've ever received. It's amazingly fast and easy, and I use it constantly. It takes so much of the work out of the whole shredding process - my grater is pretty much obsolete at this point.Post Options