Tortellini with Brown Butter and Sage

Recipe courtesy of Serious Eats

As an extreme novice home chef, I’ve been generally operating under the concept that the more complicated and time-consuming the recipe is, the more I’ll learn from it. Mark Bittman, aka The Minimalist, from the New York Times tells me I’m a moron and I can accept and partially agree with that. I still feel like if  a recipe is too simple, or too easy to prepare, it’s a copout of some kind, but in the interest of making sure my kid eats what we do (to try to encourage an adventurous palate) and feeding the one I’m pregnant with more than just Otter Pops and Doritos, I’ve been trying to add simple, fast recipes to my Bi-Monthly Menu of Doom. The past two weeks have featured more of the fast pastas, soups and this is one of them.

You will need: (for 3 servings)

• 3 servings fresh or frozen tortellini (the bag I used had 3.5 servings)
• 4-5 Tbsp. butter
• 13-16 fresh sage leaves
• Lemon juice to taste
• Black pepper to taste
• Pinch of salt (omit if using salted butter)
• Parmesan cheese (optional)

Slice up your sage leaves into strips or leave them alone, as far as I know it’s purely aesthetic. To share my experience with you, let me tell you that I first tried to slice these with a serrated knife, and it doesn’t really work like that, it just tears the leaves up. A paring knife proved to be perfect for the task.

Boil your pasta according to the directions. If you happen to be using the awesome SuperTarget store brand like I am, it’s 3-5 minutes. I went ahead and put the butter on at this point to start browning, but in reality you could do it about when the water hits a simmer and the two would time out damn near perfectly.

Maybe it’s just the South in me, but bubbling butter looks so pretty to me. You should be melting your butter over medium heat in a small skillet of some variety – stainless steel or some other non-dark material may be easiest so you can see when the butter starts to brown. You don’t want to to get dark or else you’ll hit beurre noir territory and that’s not really what we’re going for here.

You can see it’s gotten darker here, and the bits of milk solids on the pan have browned. It’s a thin line now, I left mine on just a tiny bit longer before removing it from the heat, but I think you could safely do so if yours looks like this photo.

The finished product. See the brown bits in the bottom? Delicious browned milk solids. After you remove your skillet from the heat, add your sage leaves and allow them to fry a bit in the butter, until they’re crispy. Add your lemon juice, salt and pepper to taste here as well.

Pour your sauce over your tortellini and add parmesan if you choose to. Stir it up and serve. This whole process should take you less than 10 minutes start to finish – we chose to have ours with a salad on the side and it was delicious, nutty & flavorful. I wouldn’t call it a subtle flavor but if you are used to the boldness of a tomato sauce or the richness of an alfredo-style sauce, it may take your taste buds a minute or two to get used to it. Definitely a keeper recipe for us.