Fettuccine with Agretti & Tomato Peach Salad

Today I have two dishes to share that we made on Wednesday night. Along with some burgundy beans, these two things made for an awesome mid-week dinner (albeit time-intensive).

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!

Roasted Rhubarb Jam

I had a revelation this weekend. I feel like there are so many plant foods in the world that are botanically a fruit, but nutritionally, we think of as a vegetable (tomato, cucumber, avocado, squash, etc). On the other hand, I can only come up with one botanical vegetable that we tend to classify, cook, and eat as if it were a fruit: the lowly rhubarb.

So since fruit wont be part of our CSA deliveries for another week yet, I was pretty jazzed that Steve could swap for this fruit-ish vegetable last week. As a great lover of dessert I wanted to spend some time in the kitchen cooking up something sweet! We got roughly a pound of rhubarb, and I found two intriguing recipes that each called for that amount. So I made the obvious choice and decided to make a half-recipe of each of them (totally obvious and not overkill, right?).

Rhubarb recipe #1, this roasted jam, was executed on Saturday. And it was good. Make you wish you didn't half the recipe good. I can happily affirm that this is awesome on vanilla ice cream, and it's awesome on toast (I took a cue from last week's tartines and spread some ricotta first - perfect).

Roasted Rhubarb Jam on Simply Scratch

Used From Our CSA
rhubarb

Thoughts on the Recipe
- This one was pretty straightforward. I didn't have the vanilla sugar (and have actually never made/used it before), so I followed her suggestion and just added in some vanilla bean paste with the sugar.
- After it cooled I put it in our mini food processor to get the sauce consistency.

This is a recipe I would definitely return to (and make a bigger batch of) in a future where I have more rhubarb on hand. I am saving my other half-pound for now because this weekend I have plans to attempt a half-size galette. Wish me luck...

What's your favorite thing to make with rhubarb? My mom sent me a rhubarb sangria recipe yesterday that looked pretty fun! Do you know of any other vegetables that we actually tend to think of as being more fruit-like?