I know I can’t be alone when I say that being in the kitchen in the summer is a drag. It’s hot outside, I don’t need it to be hot inside, too. And since it’s Utah, where central air is not especially common inside homes – they favor swamp coolers here – it is frequently already hot inside anyway so the last thing I want to do is make it hotter. I prefer to flavor my food with kosher salt, not beads of sweat.

Gross.

Anyway, like most people we move to a great deal of low-maintenance cooking in this wretched heat, like grilling or things that cook quickly, and especially things that can be served cold, like this fantastic pasta salad from the June/July 2010 issue of Cooking Light. It is everything you could want in a summer dish – bright, sunny notes from the fresh dill, the tang of lemon, the smooth, silky bite of cold orzo and the crunch of crisp red bell pepper and cucumber. And the best part? I listed nearly all of the ingredients right there. The full recipe is, as usual, behind the cut.

I know, too, that it’s been a long time since I’ve updated. I won’t apologize for it, since I was using that time well, or promise that I will update more frequently, because you can see that’s worked out so well in the past, so instead I will encourage you to subscribe to my RSS feed so that you’ll get the updates whenever I do get around to posting them.

And you don’t want to miss the chocolate peanut-butter cookies coming soon!

Lemony Orzo-Veggie Salad
adapted from Cooking Light
(yields four 1 1/4 cup servings)

You will need:

3/4 cup uncooked orzo (get the bronze-die cut, it’s worth it!)
1/4 tsp lemon zest
3 Tbsp fresh lemon juice
1 Tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
1/2 tsp kosher salt
1 large clove minced garlic
1/4 tsp honey
1/8 tsp freshly ground black pepper
1/2 cup diced English cucumber (these are frequently marketed as seedless, longer than standard cucumbers, and might be wrapped depending on your store)
1/2 cup diced red bell pepper
1/3 cup thinly sliced green onions
1 Tbsp chopped fresh dill (Utahns: Sunflower Market is great for fresh herbs)
1/2 cup (2 ounces) crumbled goat cheese (optional)

Cook your orzo as the package recommends, but don’t salt or oil the water. Drain and rinse with cold water, drain again and place in a large bowl.

While the orzo is cooking, combine lemon zest, juice, olive oil, salt, garlic, honey and black pepper in another bowl, whisking well to get them all together and full of deliciousness.  Pour over your cold orzo, stir well to coat. Add cucumber, bell pepper, onions and dill, and toss gently again to coat veggies. Sprinkle with the goat cheese, if you like that sort of thing. Crumble cheese are not my thing. Stick your head in the bowl and enjoy.

Just kidding. It’s for eating – so eat!

I love pasta. It’s easy to cook and you have to work really hard (or use guanciale) to make it taste bad. This particular one is new to me, contains at least two ingredients I used to refuse to touch and I want to shove it in my mouth all the time.

I’ve mentioned the knife skills class pretty frequently, and I feel like I learned a lot from it though since my retention is so awful I should really take it again, and I celebrated the purchase of a new chef’s knife with recreating the pasta that Chef Bob served to us with the fruits of our labor…with one small problem. He wouldn’t give me a recipe.

Now, he had no problem telling me everything that went in it, but as I know some of you are aware I function best with a specific set of instructions, ESPECIALLY with a new recipe. Not having portions or measurements of any kind broke my brain a little bit but I am totally pleased with the outcome, it tasted exactly like I wanted it to, and now I’m going to share it with you.

You will need: (note, these portions are for two people and a toddler, adjust as needed)
Linguine
3 Tbsp olive oil
3 Tbsp butter (or margarine)
1 medium zucchini, quartered
1 red bell pepper, cut in 1/2" strips and sliced across into thirds
2 sticks celery, halved lengthwise and chopped
3 or more crimini mushrooms, halved and sliced
1/3 to 1/2c white wine
Basil and rosemary, fresh and chopped fine if you’ve got it (worth it if you ask me)
Salt and pepper to taste

First, if you ask me the mushrooms are more for texture than taste, so don’t feel like you can’t make this if you don’t like mushrooms. Second, I wish this sauce had a name. It’s sort of like a modified beurre blanc, I guess, but nowhere near as complicated. Third, even if you don’t like zucchini, try it. Seriously. It’s like summer in your mouth and if your weather sucks as bad as mine, you pretty much want summer any way you can get it.

Onward!

Put some generously salted water on to boil for your pasta. You don’t have to use linguine, Chef Bob used spaghetti. I just try to mix up my pastas every now and then and especially now since the next two weeks are chock-full of Italian food, sez my Bi-Monthly Menu of Doom. I prepped my veggies while waiting for the boil. I like it when nothing has to be peeled. Take a minute during chopping to heat 2 Tbsp oil and 2 tbsp butter over medium-high heat in a saute pan.

(your vegetables should look something like this. If they don’t, who cares, this isn’t a Tuesday night a Le Bernardin)

When your veggies are all chopped and your oil is hot, go ahead and chuck your peppers and zucchini in the pan with some salt – have I mentioned that I like kosher salt for cooking and sea salt for finishing? Kosher is coarse, comes in a big box, is dirt cheap and tastes better than table salt. The only thing I don’t use it in is baking. Anyway, give your zuke and your pepper3-4 minutes before adding in the celery. After 2-3 minutes, add your mushrooms. If your water is boiling, throw the pasta in, it takes in the neighborhood of 8-10 minutes for al dente, if I remember right.

Here’s where it comes down to personal taste. I didn’t measure my wine, I just poured from the bottle until the amount looked "right" to me. This may be trickier for you because you’ve never had the pasta, so I’m estimating 1/3 cup. This kind of sauce lightly coats the pasta, it doesn’t pool or saturate like a tomato or cover heavily like an alfredo, and since you’re cooking it there will be a bit of reduction in the volume. So as you cook, add a glug or two more of wine and/or oil as you see fit. For the curious, I used a bottle – magnum – of Sutter Home sauvignon blanc that has been sitting in the cabinet since around Christmas half-consumed. Sometimes it’s hard to be this gourmet.

Hopefully since I failed to tell you to do so you’ve been stirring your vegetables frequently. No browning should be occurring, just softening. It should also smell divine. In a perfect world your pasta will be done at the same time as your vegetables – if you’re unsure, try a piece of the zucchini, it should be somewhat firm but tender. Add the herbs, salt and pepper, and remaining tablespoon of butter, melt, stir, and combine with the drained linguine in a big bowl. Mix everything together and chow down.

I keep mentioning being behind on posts and I am, in fact, still behind in posts. I know I’ve sent photos to Flickr for at least three other meals and those are just the ones that have made it through processing. I’ll get around to those empanadas eventually!

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.