Mató & Maple Syrup » pasta

Mushroom, kale, and walnut brown rice rottini

alexandra — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 02:28:48 +0000

For this week’s meatless monday, I made a quick weeknight pasta dish. I had a box of brown rice rottini lying about. Alas, there’s no tomato sauce. But who needs tomato sauce with some nice Tuscan kale and some mushrooms lying around? So I sliced the mushrooms, cooked in olive oil. When they were almost ready I added some garlic, seasoned with salt and pepper and the garlic was cooked I removed the mushroom mix from the pan and reserved. I then softened some shallots on the same pan, added a handful of chopped walnuts, some capers, and a bunch of thinly sliced kale. I added a 1/4 cup of water (you could use wine or stock), closed the lid to steam the kale and cooked for a couple of minutes. Once the kale was wilted, I adjusted the seasoning and tossed it all with the cooked rottini. Yum!

Meatless Monday

alexandra — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 02:50:37 +0000

The day started with a bowl of steel-cut oats cooked with turmeric, scallions, and sun-dried tomatoes and served with tamari sauce, sesame seeds, and a sprinkle of dulse. Lunch was a simple affair of leftovers from last night’s dinner: red lentil dal and quinoa cooked with mushrooms and kale. For dinner, I had a few ingredients in the fridge that needed to be used asap: tomato sauce, chard, and a head of broccoli that had seen its better days. You could use whatever vegetables you have lying around in your fridge. Nothing like a simple past dish to finish our meatless (and dairy-less) monday:

2 cups tomato sauce [since I didn’t think it would be enough for a pound of pasta, I added a small can of chopped tomatoes)
2 garlic cloves
3 small shallots
1 bunch swiss chard, stalks and leaves washed and chopped separately
1 head broccoli
1 tbsp chopped capers (optional)
1/2 cup white wine
1lb pasta (I used fusilli)

Heat some olive oil in a saucepan, add shallots and cook for a few minutes, until it begins to brown, add the garlic and the stems of the chard and let it simmer for a 2-5 minutes. Add the white wine and once it has reduced by half, add the chopped tomatoes and the tomato sauce. Let simmer for 20 mins, add capers and chopped broccoli florets and let cook for another 5 mins or until the broccoli is cooked to your satisfaction (I like al dente). Cook the pasta and add the chopped chard leaves in the last minute of cooking. Strain the pasta and chard and mix in the tomato sauce.

Gemelli with summer vegetables & white beans

alexandra — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 00:44:41 +0000

This is another good recipe in which to hide some zucchini. I came back from the market today with a craving for pasta and dying to try out Angela Russo‘s tomato sauce. I had half of a huge zucchini sitting in the fridge, and the bounty from today’s market. I started out by slicing an entire small garlic head, fresh from the market, and sauteeing it in olive oil. Once it started to golden, I added roughly two cups of grated zucchini, 1 cup grated carrots (1 small yellow carrot, and a small purple carrot), and put a lid on the pan while I chopped some leftover roasted eggplant. After the zucchini & carrot mixture had cooked for about 5 minutes, I added the tomato sauce (abou 2 cups), eggplant, and one can of navy beans. I let it simmer for a few minutes and tried some to judge how much salt & pepper I’d need to add. To my surprise, the sauce was just SO flavourful I didn’t need to add any salt. I added a 1/4 cup chopped basil & flat leaf parsley and served it on pasta. I used gemelli pasta but I bet it would be great with fussili or penne too.

This is what the sauce looked like:

It could be served on top of rice or any other grain or served with bread.

Fresh pasta with tomatoes & basil

alexandra — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 12:16:39 +0000

This is a simple and quick way of eating pasta in the summer. The sauce is uncooked – so more like making a pasta salad – but mixing it with the hot pasta makes for a nice, balanced dish. I had made salsa cruda with orecchieti before but this time I had some fresh whole wheat & tomato pasta that I had bought last weekend at the farmers’ market. But I didn’t have garlic, which is totally unheard of in Casa A & A. Rummaging through the fridge, I came across those garlic scapes I bought last weekend and which I wasn’t sure what to do with. A bit of googling tells me one could make a pesto out of it by simply pulsing it with some olive oil. That sounds simple enough. So instead of garlic in the recipe above, I mixed a couple tbsps of garlic scapes pesto. I also added some sun dried tomatoes to the fresh ones. It was all very simple and yummy.

Penne with roasted tomatoes, garlic, kale and white beans

alexandra — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 21:22:10 +0000

The picture of this delectable summery pasta dish was on a special edition of Fine Cooking magazine and made it impossible for me to walk by and not get the magazine. The recipe is by Ellie Krieger, and you can find it on the Food Network site or penne. Since I had a bit of curly kale to use, I chopped them and added to the hot pasta when I mixed in the tomatoes and garlic. It was very yummy!