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Recipe: Linguine with spinach pesto 21 August 2007 9:02 am

Posted by Tracy in : cheese,cooking,eating,recipes,vegan,vegetarian , trackback

Another recipe first published at Everything2.com, where it was dedicated to Peter, my food’s greatest fan, with many thanks, which seemed worth repeating again here. The story of this meal begins one night when I was sautéing mushrooms, onions, garlic, green pepper and herbs for a pasta sauce that would eventually incorporate a bunch of tomato as well. “That smells good enough to eat just like that,” Peter said, and since I’m always on the lookout for good pasta sauces that don’t use tomato, it caught my attention. That night I went ahead with dinner as planned, although I did come up with the idea of incorporating the veggies into a pesto-based sauce. But then a few days later I found myself mucking around the kitchen trying to figure out what to do with just enough spinach for one person to have steamed or in a salad. It was about enough to blend into ricotta cheese for lasagna filling, or chop into macaroni and cheese before baking (in fact, we had leftover spinach exactly because we’d had a little too much to use in a mac and cheese, but I digress).

Here’s why this recipe is really revolutionary for me: Pesto, in my brain, is always basil and garlic-based unless explicitly specified otherwise. Yet somehow on that fateful night, many years ago, I got it into my head that I could use spinach as the leafy green basis for the paste, and that it could be good. I had to try. Here’s what I did:

Ingredients

Directions

Start by making the pesto: Sauté the first 3 or 4 cloves of garlic in olive oil in a frying pan on medium heat. When they start to release their wonderful pungent smell, add the spinach. Stir until the spinach is coated in oil and garlic, and cook until the leaves have just wilted. Remove from heat and purée in a food processor with the grated cheese and basil. You should have about 3/4 of a cup to a cup of warm green aromatic paste. Set it aside for now.

Next, start 10 or more cups of water boiling on the stove in an appropriately-sized pot. Add a few pinches of salt if you like.

While you’re waiting for the water to boil, sauté the mushrooms in 1-2 more tablespoons of olive oil on medium heat (you can use the same pan you used for the spinach; they won’t mind). Add the zucchini, then the onions, then the garlic, stirring occasionally but not constantly. (If you’re cutting up the vegetables as you go along, like I did, the water will get to a boil at around this point, although that will vary depending on your stove and vegetable-processing speed.) Cook the linguine for 7 to 9 minutes, depending on how al dente you like it. Meanwhile, add the dried herbs to the sautéing vegetables when the mushrooms start to smell tasty and the onions are beginning to become transparent.

When the pasta are cooked to your satisfaction, drain them and put them back in the pot, and toss them with the spinach pesto until they are well-coated. Serve topped with generous servings of the vegetable sauté and a little more grated cheese for big presentation points.

Notes: This works with regular basil pesto as well, but I’d recommend using only 1/8 to 1/4 cup instead of the full 1/2 cup, since basil pesto is much stronger than the spinach kind described above. You could make this dish vegan simply by omitting the cheese, but you’ll definitely want to add a little more salt to your pesto, and maybe a tablespoon or two of toasted nuts to the pesto or topping for added savory goodness (I like walnuts, myself).

Serves two, takes about half an hour from beginning to end (45 minutes, tops) , and looks almost as good as it tastes. Try cooking it for a date, maybe with a simple green salad and bread and a glass of nice red wine! Note how you could have the pesto ready-made and the veggies chopped and ready to go for super-fast “check out my awesome organization and general kitchen kung fu” style and flair!