the review: pasta with asparagus
Ugh. The Costco run. After two weeks of bare bones food in the house, it was time to suck it up and make the big shopping trip. The good news? Fresh wild salmon. Yippee! And I just so happened to have cilantro and oranges on hand so I was able to revisit the citrus grilled salmon that we made a couple of weeks ago. Still delicious.
With our lovely grilled fish, we decided to try tajarin, asparagus, parmesan, and basil from Collards and Carbonara (page 76). I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to make the tajarin (a particular shape of egg pasta) once I got home from shopping (our nearest Costco, Target, etc., is an hour away so it takes at least five hours every time we make the trip), so I purchased “fresh” pasta in place of the tajarin. Meh. Should have served this on a night when I could have made fresh pasta.
I am certain that the fresh egg pasta would have made all the difference in this recipe. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t bad (the kids killed it – all two pounds of pasta AND a pound and a half of fish), it just wasn’t great. Cooking this dish was kind of a weird process too. While the pasta is cooking, basil is cooked in unsalted butter then the pasta (plus asparagus, which has been thrown into the pasta water for the last 45 seconds of cooking – very precise) is tossed in the basil butter and a bit of pasta water. The weird part is that the recipe calls for removing the basil once everything is tossed together. It would have been much easier to remove the basil before everything was tossed together and I am still not sure (after eating the dish) why the basil was removed last or actually even at all.
While the kids were happy with this dish, I thought it lacked flavor. My husband liked the combination of the salmon with the pasta. He said that he felt the salmon was so well seasoned, that it complimented the (in my opinion rather bland) pasta. Lucky for me, I’m in charge of menu planning, so I probably will not make this again. Unlucky for the kids, though, because I’ve already been asked if we will be having this pasta again. Maybe I will try it with the egg dough as directed. I don’t know…there are an awful lot of other things that look delicious and that I’m dying to try. Like have you seen the most recent issue of Food and Wine? I’m drooling…
Also, if you need a little encouragement for feeding your family with balance, give this a read. I loved it.