Our main dish was this lemon fettuccine with agretti. For the most part we do not tend to be big pasta people, but since we had no earthly idea what to do with the agretti or previous context for how to eat it, pasta seemed like a reasonable place to start. And man oh man, what a treat; who knew that lemon and bacon could compliment each other so well? Add in the agretti, and we had the perfect triumvirate of winning at pasta. We ended up dumbing down the recipe quite a bit; and I'll elaborate more on that below. But even with our cheats it was totally worthwhile.
Lemon Fettuccine with Agretti, Bacon, and Roasted Garlic on Round the Table
On the side we had this tomato, peach & burrata salad. It's basically a fun variation on the caprese salad theme: heirloom tomato, peach, burrata cheese, and a balsamic reduction with some basil. A total win and, in contrast to the pasta, quick and easy to put together. As she says in the recipe, fresh mozzarella can substitute for the burrata if needed. It was more steeply priced, but we decided to spring for it because we were curious. It's basically a cream-infused fresh mozzarella, so ... yeah; we obviously wanted to give that a whirl. And since we only needed half of it, we should be able to repeat this recipe again soon. Woohoo!
Tomato, Peach & Burrata Salad on two peas & their pod
Used From Our CSA
agretti
peaches
burgundy beans (eaten on the side)
Thoughts on the (Pasta) Recipe
- We had several ingredient substitutions in this: regular fettuccine instead of lemon fettuccine (couldn't even find it at our run-of-the-mill grocery store), raw garlic instead of roasted (didn't want to take the time to roast it ourselves for just two cloves' worth), and Parmesan cheese instead of Romano (because it's what we keep on hand). I'm sure it had the potential to be even more awesome had we used some of those swankier things, but the good news is that it was still great without them.
- I'm not sure if this is always the case, but we realized, once we had served up our finished pasta, that the agretti stems were pretty woody and tough to eat. So we went through it all after the fact to cut the softer leaves from their stems, which clearly would have been much easier before it was all cooked and cheesy. Next time we'll get that right, but still: no real harm done. Once that was taken care of I really enjoyed the taste of this interesting Mediterranean vegetable.
Has anyone else ever cooked with agretti? Did you have to remove the stems? What did you make? Leave your thoughts in the comments!
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