Tag: easy

Orecchiette Carbonara with Freshly-Shelled Peas

34 Comments


On a hot and sticky mid-August night several years ago, I boarded an overnight train from Paris to Milan. The cabin was filled with two sets of bunk-beds that were meant to accommodate four people. Instead, we were five because the couple sharing the cabin with us had a toddler.

The family asked if they could have the bottom bunks, which was fine by me because I wanted to bunk closest to the itty bitty window that cracked open at a woefully insufficient angle.

Insufficient because the father had removed his shoes and the smell was horrific.

It was so bad that I couldn’t sleep. I was finally forced to look in my Italian phrasebook and scan the pages by moonlight for something appropriate to say that would make the man put his darn shoes back on!

Unfortunately, my phrase book had nothing related to shoes, or putting on shoes or telling people that the smell of their feet was intolerable. However, I did manage this:

“Per fevore, signore. I vostri piedi, è violazione dei miei diritti umani!”

Which worked out roughly to mean, “Excuse me, sir. Your feet, this is a violation of my human rights!”

No response. So I tried these other phrases:

“I vostri piedi, sto svenendo . . . Non riesco a respirare . . . !”

Which means: “Your feet, I’m passing out . . . I cannot breathe . . . !”

Then I repeated, “I vostri piedi,” pointed to his feet, crossed my eyes and pretended to die.

Nothing. Nada. Zilch.

He must have understood me because he refused to acknowledge my existence. I tried not to take it personally, even though I hated him more and more as we crawled south to Italy. Maybe, I thought, he was trying to incapacitate his over-active son. Or maybe he was angry at his wife and was trying to suffocate her with the smell of his feet.

Seriously. If that smell could be weaponized, the war on terror would be over.

So what does this have to do with carbonara, that amazing Italian dish that uses the residual heat of freshly boiled pasta to transform bacon, beaten eggs and Parmesan into a creamy sauce?

In that very same Italian phrase book was a recipe for spaghetti alla carbonara, a recipe that I still rely on to this day.

The idea to use orecchiette and peas actually comes from Suzanne Goin‘s Sunday Suppers at Lucques. Her description of how orecchiette are perfectly shaped to cup small bits of bacon and peas was irresistible to me, but I prefer to stick with my old phrasebook’s way of making carbonara because it only uses one pan — and who doesn’t prefer that?

These proportions will make enough for two, but can easily be adjusted for more. For something richer, you could add about a 1/3 of a cup of caramelized chopped onions to the mix. This recipe was also a great way to start using the wonderful shell peas that are at the market right now, as well as the bacon and pullet eggs from my CSA.

Pullet eggs are small eggs from young hens that have just started laying. They say that two pullet eggs are the equivalent of one regular chicken egg, but I find that it’s really more like 3 pullet eggs = 2 regular chicken eggs. Pullet eggs are wonderfully rich in both flavor and mouthfeel, just perfect for carbonara if you can get a hold of some.

I also used up the last of my CSA bacon ends to make my bacon bits, but you can use crumbled cooked bacon strips in this if bacon ends are not handy.

Ingredients:

1/3 pound of dried orecchiette

1/3 cup of bacon bits or crumbled cooked bacon

1/3 cup of freshly shucked green peas or frozen peas

5 pullet eggs or three regular eggs

1/2 cup of freshly grated Parmesan

Freshly grated black pepper

Olive oil

How to prepare:

1. Bring a medium saucepan of salted water to a boil. When the water has reached a rolling boil, add the pasta. While the pasta is cooking, set up the other ingredients. This recipe moves quickly near the end, so it is a good idea to have everything ready to go.

2. Combine the Parmesan and eggs in a small bowl with freshly ground black pepper.

3. When the pasta is not quite al dente, add the peas to the boiling water. Let the pasta and peas finish cooking together. Drain and pour the pasta and peas back into the saucepan. Add the bacon along with a quick drizzle of olive oil. Pour the beaten egg mixture over the pasta and begin stirring everything together quickly. When you add the eggs, the pasta should be warm enough to barely cook them. You want the sauce to be just thick enough to coat the pasta with a glossy sheen. If the sauce seems soupy instead of creamy, put the pan over a very low flame and continue to stir and toss the pasta quickly until the sauce turns smooth and creamy.

Don’t worry if you accidentally overcook the eggs and they scramble a little bit. It will still be delicious.

French Breakfast Radishes Sautéed in Butter

50 Comments


The idea for this side dish came from Susan over at Susan eats London. It’s hardly a recipe, just French breakfast radishes split in half and sautéed in butter and olive oil.

French breakfast radishes are elongated, rosy-colored radishes tipped with white at the root end. The French adore them. You see them everywhere, but I can’t recall ever hearing them called breakfast radishes in France. No “radis petit-déjeuner.” No “bweakfast wadeeesh” either.

The exact reason for why they are called French breakfast radishes is unclear. From what I can find out, their name has nothing to do with the French having them for breakfast. Instead, it comes from the Victorians who liked to eat them for breakfast or afternoon tea. “French breakfast radish” is the blanket term for any small, oblong, pink and white-tipped radish. These kinds of radishes were considered French because of their association to the French from the English perspective (the English observed that the French liked to eat a lot of them). They became known as those French radishes that you had while sipping your English breakfast tea.

French breakfast radishes are the quintessential radish for slathering with good soft butter and dunking in flaky sea salt. They are also delicious sautéed in butter. Cooked, the radishes lose their bitter bite and they turn into succulent butter bombs. During cooking, the radishes give up some of their essence and make the most beautiful pink-hued sauce. They are impossible to resist.

Susan calls them food crack, and who can resist food crack? Not me!

Ingredients:

Butter

Olive oil

1 bunch of French breakfast radishes, trimmed and halved lengthwise

Salt

Chives

How to prepare:

1. In a skillet large enough to accommodate all the radishes, melt a big knob of butter with a little bit of olive oil. When the butter begins to foam, add the radishes. Season them with salt and sauté them until the radishes lose their opacity and they all begin to turn translucent. Transfer the radishes to a serving dish and snip fresh chives over them before serving.

Welsh Rabbit with Radish Greens

55 Comments


You can admit it: the title of this blog post made you want to speak like Elmer Fudd.

Because what’s better than a post about Welsh rabbit?

A post about wascally Welsh wabbit with wadishes! Specifically, wadish gweens!

You’re vewy, vewy welcome.

I was buying even more radishes at the market on Friday when I noticed that my hands and arms were itchy. Why? Because radish leaves have little prickles. They don’t sting, but they can irritate if you have sensitive skin. So while I was waiting in line, rubbing my hands and arms, my mind naturally drifted to stinging nettles — whose short season I seem to have missed completely. Then I started thinking that maybe radish leaves would be a good substitution for them in recipes.

The inspiration for this dish came, not from Bugs Bunny, but from from Nigel Slater‘s recipe for Welsh rabbit with nettles.

Welsh rabbit (also known as rarebit) is basically cheese on toast. The best cheese on toast that you will ever have. I’m not entirely sure of the origins of the name. I read that it was a term coined in the 18th Century by the English to make fun of the Welsh who had lots of cheese but little meat. But there seems to also exist an English rabbit, a Scotch rabbit and an Irish rabbit — none of which have any rabbit in them either. They are all just cheese on toast.

Technically, this should probably be called American rabbit — specifically New Hampshire rabbit because the Welsh-style cheese that I used is made New Hampshire, USA at Landaff Creamery. Landaff Creamery is named after the Welsh hamlet of Llandaff, just to the north of Cardiff. I’m not quite sure why they lopped off the extra l. Maybe there was some kind of international branding issue. Or maybe it’s because the difficult to pronounce Welsh double l supposedly gets lopped off by Welsh capital dwellers, and the creamery’s owners figured that if it was too hard for them, it would be impossible for us. My cheesemonger didn’t seem to have any trouble pronouncing it as if it had double l. Where did he learn that?!

Ingredients:

About a cup of radish leaves, washed

Olive oil

2 tablespoons of crème fraîche

1 teaspoon of grainy mustard

1/2 cup of crumbled Caerphilly, Caerphilly-like cheese or Cheddar (see here for more alternatives)

Freshly ground black pepper

Freshly grated nutmeg

2 slices of sourdough bread, lightly toasted on both sides (you can also use multigrain bread)

How to prepare:

1. Heat some olive oil in a medium saucepan over medium heat. When the oil becomes fragrant, add the radish greens to the pan along with about a tablespoon of water. Sauté the greens until they just wilted. Remove the greens to a colander to drain.

2. When the greens are cool enough to handle, gently press as much liquid out of them as you can. Roughly chop the leaves.

3. In medium-sized bowl, mix together the chopped greens, the crème fraîche, the mustard and the crumbled cheese. Season the mixture with freshly ground black pepper and freshly grated nutmeg to taste. Divide the mixture in half and mound it evenly onto each slice of toast. Arrange them on a large sheet of aluminum foil and place the toasts under the broiler until browned and golden.

Finnish Ruis Bread Topped with Sliced Radishes and Soft Butter

25 Comments


I ate my first radish after watching Shelley Duvall’s Faerie Tale Theater. Do you remember that series? Maybe it was a little dark for children, but I loved it and thought Shelley Duvall was the bomb as Rapunzel.

If you remember the story, it all starts when Rapunzel’s mother develops a serious pregnancy craving for radishes, specifically the radishes topped with blue leaves growing in her neighbor’s garden. Unfortunately, instead of just going next door and asking the neighbor for some radishes, or even offering to pay for the radishes, her husband decides that he is going to scale the garden wall in the middle of the night and steal them.

If it had been Texas or Florida, he would have just been shot on sight, but since it’s Faerie Tale-land, the neighbor just takes their first-born.

Did I mention that she’s a witch?

That really got my 7 year-old brain working. What food would be so good that it would cause you to ignore common sense (don’t break, enter and steal from witches)? I had to get one of these radish-things. They must, I thought, be amazing!

After pestering my parents, they finally came home from the market with a nice bunch of radishes. They were so pretty: bright red on the outside and snowy white on the inside. No blue leaves, but I could deal with the thought of that particular variety being unavailable at our local supermarket.

I put one in my mouth, chewed . . . and spat it right back out. Blech! Stupid fairy tale!

I pretty much avoided radishes after that until I was 14 and was served them in France. Not wanting to be impolite, I followed my host family’s lead and slathered the offensive root with butter before popping it in my mouth.

Imagine my shock: the radish wasn’t offensive at all. It was . . . delicious!

And I have loved them ever since.

These little toasts can hardly be considered a recipe; they are just something that I love to have for lunch when radishes are in season. I really like using Finnish Ruis bread made by NYC-based Nordic Breads (the best Ruis bread ever). Nordic Breads ships their rounds anywhere, but in a pinch, any good rye bread will do as long as it is sliced thinly.

I’m not paid to say this about Nordic Breads at all, I just think their bread is wonderful 🙂

Ingredients:

Finnish Ruis bread, or any thinly sliced good rye bread

Radishes, thinly sliced

Good soft butter

Good sea salt

How to prepare:

1. If using Finnish Ruis bread, cut each round into halves or quarters before splitting them through the middle. Toast the bread and let it cool completely.

2. When the bread is cool, spread the soft butter evenly over the top of each piece. Arrange the sliced radishes on top and sprinkle them with good, flaky sea salt. Eat immediately.

Kale Paneer

28 Comments


I can’t take credit for this recipe. That honor goes to the amazing Tahmina at Kolpona Cuisine whose recipe for Saag (Palak) Paneer gave me a delicious way to polish off the remainder of my giant pile of kale. The only changes that I made were to A) use fresh kale instead of spinach, and to B) forget to add the fenugreek leaves. I only realized that they were missing after I started eating 😦

Next time, I will follow Tahmina’s lead and make my own paneer. I bought it this time for the sake of convenience. I also didn’t think that fresh kale would release more liquid than fresh spinach when cooked. I should have compensated by reducing the amount of water that I added to the dish.

This was really, really good. So good that I ate it with piles of white rice! And Tahmina, you like it spicy! Thank goodness, because I like it spicy too 🙂

Thanks for the great recipe; I loved it!

Kale Pesto with Whole Wheat Fusilli

20 Comments


What’s a girl to do when faced with too much kale and too little time? Make pesto!

When it comes to something like pesto, it’s hard to say that anyone has proprietary claims to any one recipe. I did look at this recipe on Tastespotting and this recipe on Food 52 for nut-cheese-oil ratios. In all honesty, I have so much kale on hand that I threw those proportions right out of the window. I just kept tinkering and measuring until I had a sauce that was so good, I wanted to eat more and more of it.

Kale has a clean, bitter flavor that I think pairs better with walnuts than pine nuts. When using walnuts, I like to also use walnut oil. Some Meyer lemon zest keeps the sauce nice and fresh. You can also zest a regular lemon if Meyer lemons are not available to you. If you don’t want to emphasize kale’s refreshing bitterness, you can use just olive oil. It will still taste great.

Kale pesto has an earthier flavor than basil-based pestos, and that flavor demands a heartier pasta like whole wheat. Fusilli is always a good choice for pesto because the spirals catch and capture the sauce beautifully.

It’s always a good idea to toss pasta and pesto together in a separate bowl. You don’t want the Parmesan in the sauce to burn and stick to the bottom of a hot pot or pan. The warm pasta — plus a little of the hot pasta cooking water if needed— will loosen the sauce up without the need for any external heat.

I am looking forward to eating my kale pesto in other ways this week, like on pizza or in lasagna. I hope it freezes well too because I made a lot of it!

Ingredients:

1 pound of whole wheat fusilli

2/3 of a cup of walnuts

2 cloves of garlic

2/3 of a cup of freshly grated Parmesan

The zest of 1 lemon

5 cups of washed and torn kale leaves, no stems and no ribs

1/2 cup of olive oil

1/2 cup of walnut oil

Salt

How to prepare:

1. Preheat the oven to 350°.

2. Spread the walnuts out in an even layer on a baking tray. Bake the walnuts until they are nicely toasted. This can take between 6-8 minutes. Be very careful to not let the walnuts burn. Let them cool before making the pesto.

3. While the walnuts are cooling, bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Cook the pasta until it is al dente, about 12 minutes.

4. While the pasta is cooking, combine the garlic and walnuts together in a food processor with some salt. Add the Parmesan and the lemon zest. Pack all the kale into the food processor bowl and with the processor running, slowly drizzle in the olive and walnut oils. Continue to process everything until you have a smooth and creamy sauce. Adjust the seasoning.

5. When the pasta is cooked, drain it and pour it into a large bowl. Add the pesto, a dollop at a time, until the pasta is nicely and evenly coated. Serve immediately.

Spicy Braised Kale and Mushroom-Topped Polenta with Poached Goose Egg

24 Comments


In a fit of health consciousness, I went a little crazy at the market and bought several large bunches of local kale. When washed, it amounted to more than 30 cups. Yes, you heard that right: 30 packed cups of kale!

I love kale, but this was a little much even for me. Kale has been going into everything lately from eggs to potatoes, from soup to salad. But no matter how much kale I use, the pile doesn’t seem to diminish much. It’s the neverending pile o’ kale!

I took advantage of this kale-pportunity to try out another way to make polenta. Polenta is one of those things that is just elemental, like roast chicken or omelets. There are a million ways to make polenta. You can make it in the oven, the slow-cooker, the microwave or on the stove. You can cook it for 15 minutes or hours. You can spread it out onto a sheet pan and cut the hardened polenta into squares. You can deep-fry leftover polenta. The smallest amount of corn meal seems to make mountains of polenta. It’s a polenta-palooza!

Great to pair with the neverending pile o’ kale, no?

This polenta-making technique is from those fiddly folks at Cook’s Illustrated. It only takes 30 minutes of minimal whisking to achieve creamy polenta perfection.

And, as you can see, my CSA has goose eggs! Which are big honking suckers 😉 The equivalent, more or less, of two chicken eggs. There are a million ways to poach eggs too, but lately I have been liking Food52’s Control-Freak Poaching Method.

Ingredients:

For the polenta:

6 cups of water or stock

Salt

1 1/2 cups of yellow corn meal

4 tablespoons of butter

1/3 – 1/2 of a cup of grated Pecorino Romano or Parmesan

For the Spicy Braised Kale and Mushrooms:

2 tablespoons of butter

Olive oil

2 garlic cloves, finely minced

8 ounces of white button mushrooms, sliced

Salt and pepper

Red chili pepper flakes

1/4 cup of dry white wine

6 cups of roughly chopped kale

For the poached eggs:

Water

Salt

1 goose egg per person

How to prepare:

1. In a large, heavy Dutch oven, bring the 6 cups of water or stock almost to a boil with the lid on. Uncover the pot and season the water or stock with salt. Vigorously whisk the corn meal into the liquid a little bit at a time. As you whisk, be sure to get in all the corners and edges of the pot with the whisk to ensure that there are no lumps. When all the corn meal has been added to the water, cover the pot again and reduce the heat to low. Let the polenta simmer, stirring every 5 minutes, for 30 minutes total.

2. In the meanwhile, melt 2 tablespoons of butter with a little bit of olive oil in a large skillet set over medium heat. When the butter begins to foam, add the minced garlic and the mushrooms. Sauté the mushrooms until they give up most of their liquid and begin to turn golden. Add the white wine and as many red chili pepper flakes as you like. Season the mushrooms with salt and pepper. When the liquid has reduced to almost a glaze, add the kale to the pan and cover the skillet. Let the leaves wilt completely before stirring the kale and mushrooms together. Adjust the seasoning for a final time and remove the pan from the heat.

3. After 30 minutes, your polenta should be done. Move the pot away from the burner and vigorously whisk in the butter, one tablespoon at a time, until it has all been well-incorporated and the polenta is creamy. Stir in the Pecorino or Parmesan and adjust the seasoning.

4. In a medium-sized saucepan, bring about 4 to 5 inches of salted water to a near simmer. Carefully crack a goose egg into a small fine-mesh strainer. You want to separate the yolk and the more solid part of the white from the more watery part of the white. Carefully pour the egg into a large, shallow spoon. Gently lower the spoon into the water. Use another spoon to catch any bits of white that try to escape. When the egg is perfectly poached, the white should be opaque and when you gently move the egg back and forth, the white and the yolk should move in sync. When the egg is done, lift it out of the water and very carefully roll it onto a paper towel-lined plate.

5. To assemble the dish, spoon out about half a cup of polenta into a large, shallow bowl. Top the polenta with about a third of a cup of the spicy braised kale and mushrooms. Carefully position the poached egg on top of the braised kale and drizzle everything with good olive oil. Serve immediately.

Asparagus with Fried Egg and Parmesan

34 Comments


It’s asparagus season! Which means it’s time for my favorite fast lunch: sweet local asparagus topped with a fried egg and sprinkled with Parmesan. To anyone who thinks that making yourself lunch takes too much time, I challenge them to find something quicker than this meal.

But, Daisy, don’t you have to steam asparagus? Or boil it? That takes time!

Oh no no, young Padawan. You can . . . microwave it!

This idea comes from Andrew Carmellini‘s Urban Italian. In the book, he recommends microwaving asparagus as a quick and terrific way to perfectly cook it without sullying up another pot. I just have to quote him on this:

“Asparagus in the microwave is awesome. Yup. You read that right. I’m sure some food snob somewhere is recoiling in horror and throwing this book across the room, but I don’t care.”

I don’t care either. I love Carmellini’s food. He’s got a Michelin star and two James Beard Awards. If microwaving asparagus is good enough for him, it’s good enough for me.

This is one of those no recipe-recipes that can be multiplied by as much as you need. I give you the recipe for one but obviously, if you are cooking for more people, you will need to punch an extra minute or two into the microwave.

Ingredients:

6-7 asparagus spears, rinsed clean and trimmed of their woody ends

Olive oil

1 egg

Butter

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Grated Parmesan cheese

How to prepare:

1. Spread out the asparagus in a single layer on a microwave-safe plate. Season the asparagus with salt and sprinkle on a little bit of water. Drizzle it with some olive oil. Cover the plate tightly with plastic wrap and nuke it for 1 minute and 30 seconds.

2. In the meanwhile, fry up an egg in butter.

3. Carefully remove the plastic wrap from the plate and arrange the asparagus spears on a clean plate. Top the asparagus with the fried egg. Season everything with salt and black pepper. Sprinkle on as much grated Parmesan as you like.

Serve with a good, crusty bread.

Kimchi Fried Rice

49 Comments


“I never see you eat rice,” Laura said, “Ever.”

“That’s not true! I eat risotto! and paella! and biryani . . .”

But despite my protestations, it is true though: I am not a fan of plain, steamed white rice.

I am so un-Asian.

When people find out I don’t really like plain white rice, I generally get two reactions:

• From non-Asian people, they look at me as if I just told them I was born with six fingers on one hand and the extra digit was removed at birth. At this point, they usually tell me how much they love rice.

• From Asian people, they just ignore me. I don’t even think they hear the “don’t,” they just hear the “like white rice.” Because what Asian doesn’t like white rice? Inconceivable!

Plain white rice was the bane of my young existence. As a child, it was always just giant piles of tasteless filler stacked in sticky, unswallowable heaps in front of me. My parents used to make me finish all of my rice before I was allowed to leave the dinner table. I used to drive them crazy by eating my rice grain-by-grain until they finally gave up and sent me to my room — which is all I really wanted in the first place.

As I have gotten older, I have learned to eat it. Partly because it gives me something to chew on as I contemplate all the dishes spinning around the Lazy Susan. After really strong flavors, I have come to appreciate white rice as a palate cleanser. Also, a Chinese meal just feels incomplete without rice on the table, regardless whether I eat any or not.

There is one way to always get me to eat my rice: fry it.

But let’s be honest, I’ll eat just about anything so long as it’s fried 😉

Kimchi fried rice is a particularly good way to get me to eat rice because not only is it fried, it’s so far removed from bland, steamed white rice that I will happily accept it on my plate. For this, I threw in some amazing all-beef hotdogs from my CSA. I know that there are a lot of people who don’t like hotdogs, but I never wonder what is in the ones that I get from my farmer. If you are a vegetarian, or just don’t like hotdogs, you can leave them out. Or replace them with Spam 😉

It’s also traditionally topped with a fried egg, and who can resist fried food topped with more fried food?!

Kimchi fried rice calls for a nice dollop of Korean red pepper paste, or gochujang. Gochujang is one of the most common condiments/ingredients in Korean cooking and as such, is fairly easy to find in Asian supermarkets. I think the problem is that there are so many brands of commercially-made gochujang that it can be a little overwhelming as to which one to pick. This is why I love this post from One Fork, One Spoon. As Diane and Grace point out, it’s hard to shop for Korean ingredients if you don’t speak Korean! I certainly don’t, and really appreciated their tasting notes and photographs of labels and brand logos.

Ingredients:

1 tablespoon of butter

1 tablespoon of vegetable oil

2-3 hot dogs, cut into pieces

2-3 green onions, chopped

2 cups of cooked (preferably day old) rice, japonica variety preferred

1 tablespoon of sesame oil

2 cups of napa cabbage kimchi, roughly chopped

1 tablespoon of gochujang

Salt

1 egg per person

How to prepare:

1. In a large skillet, heat the butter and oil over medium-high heat until the oil begins to shimmer. Add the sliced hot dogs and the green onions. Cook the hot dogs until they are heated through and the green onions have softened.

2. Add the rice to the pan, breaking up any clumps with the side of a wooden spoon or a spatula. Evenly drizzle the sesame oil over the top of the rice and let it cook undisturbed for about a minute before stirring it.

3. Add the chopped kimchi and the gochujang to the skillet. Stir everything together until red pepper paste has been well-incorporated and the kimchi has been evenly distributed throughout the rice.  Adjust the seasoning. Lower the heat and spread the rice and kimchi out in an even layer over the bottom of the pan. Let it cook for a few minutes until the rice has become nice and crispy on the bottom. Stir the pan again, scraping the browned rice off the bottom of the skillet. Adjust the seasoning for a final time and divide the fried rice into bowls.

4. In a separate pan, fry up one egg per person. Top each bowl of kimchi fried rice with an egg. Scatter some chopped green onions on top and serve.

Green Garlic Shrimp Scampi with Linguine

21 Comments


I am finally getting to the end of the massive amount of green garlic that I bought at the Greenmarket. Whew! It has been a very delicious process, but it still feels good to polish it off.

With the last three bulbs, I decided to go hog-wild with . . . not hog, shrimp!

Big, fat, sugary sweet Florida Gulf shrimp. Deepwater Horizon be damned. Yeah, there are some scary reports out there, but it’s not like I have Gulf shrimp every day. And I just had four. They were supposedly wild, which is supposed to be okay.

I live in New York City so I figure that the air I breathe is probably deadlier.

They were so tasty. And the green garlic was a great spring twist on shrimp scampi, that Italian-American classic. No green garlic? The original calls for regular garlic and is still delicious. Don’t want to chance it with Gulf shrimp? Go for any shrimp that make your motor run. Or no shrimp at all — the sauce for the linguine is incredible on its own.

On another note, has anyone been having a problem with the WordPress Reader? Generally, you should be able to see an updated feed of all the blogs you follow when you open it, right? Lately, it hasn’t been updating the some of the blogs that I follow. It’s really random, though. Sometimes it will just skip posts, or sometimes it just stops updating a single blog altogether.

I read somewhere that the solution is to edit the list and refollow everyone. I started doing that, but it was so annoying that I stopped.

Has anyone else had this problem? There must be another fix . . .

Ingredients:

1/3 pound of dried linguine

1 tablespoon of olive oil

3 green garlic bulbs, the white parts and the tender green stems finely chopped

1 tablespoon of parsley, finely chopped

2 tablespoons of butter

Red chili pepper flakes to taste

1/3 cup of dry white wine

1/2 pound of shrimp, shelled and deveined

The juice of one lemon

How to prepare:

1. Bring a large pot of salted water to boil and cook the linguine until it is al dente.

2. While the pasta is cooking, heat a tablespoon of olive oil over medium heat in a heavy saucepan or a Dutch oven until it begins to shimmer. Add the green garlic and sauté it until it begins to soften and turn translucent. Stir in the butter, the parsley, and red chili pepper flakes to taste. When the butter has completely melted, carefully add the white wine and the shrimp to the pan. Cook the shrimp until they are pink on the outside and their flesh has turned white or opaque all the way through, about 3-5 minutes.

3. Add the cooked linguine to the pan and toss everything together. Turn off the heat and add the lemon juice to the pasta. Toss again before dividing it up the and serving.