Penne with pesto — or Penne alla Pesto if you want to impress people — is a great, light dish that you can throw together in almost no time when you don’t want to heat the kitchen up during the summer.
Assuming you’ve already got your fresh pesto, cook up a pound of penne pasta. Drain it, and mix in three or four tablespoons of butter.
Add a couple of tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil.
And a tablespoon of that fresh-made pesto.
Have your wife sample it, and find out that she likes pesto more than you remembered.
Stir in another tablespoon of pesto.
And that’s it.
Told you it was easy.
Want more like this? For more recipes like this, that you can hold right in your hands, and write on, take notes, tear pages out if you want (Gosh, you're tough on books, aren't you?) you might be interested in How To Cook Like Your Grandmother, 2nd edition, Illustrated. Or to learn your way around the kitchen, check out Starting From Scratch: The Owner's Manual for Your Kitchen.
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6 Comments
I dunno–cooking a pound of pasta is a pretty good way to heat MY kitchen up. All that boiling water, you know . . .
Well, it’s better than cooking the pasta and marinara sauce, right?
Besides, I keep the lid on the pot until the water boils, and I have an electric stove. So I don’t get that much heat or steam into the room until I put the pasta in, then it’s only 11 minutes until it’s done.
That looks great. I have a container of pesto in my fridge. This just might be the way to put it to good use.
Now you have the basic recipe… fabulous stand-alone recipe… but, saute up some cubed chicken breast and toss with your recipe… better yet, sauteed or grilled shrimp! Oh, the possibilities! Pesto is soooo user friendly!
That’s why I break up some of these recipes into two steps. Now I can point to the pesto from my spaghettis sauce recipes and from my penne recipe. And of course when I add the shrimp, scallops and sun-dried tomatoes … wait, need to run to the store now …
A “great, light dish”? “Great”, OK, I’ll give you that… But “light”? That depends.
On whether you define something consisting of 99% carbohydrates from white wheat-flour as “light”, is what it depends on.
Some of us wouldn’t. (Actually, Drew; I thought you belonged to that bunch…?)