Left Coast Contessa

brown spaghetti with asparagus puree

December 31, 2010 at 3:30 am 2 comments

Since the theme of the week is detox I decided to start my dinners off right last night with brown spaghetti with asparagus puree out of my new cookbook Super Natural Cooking by Heidi Swanson. My friend Brenna gave it to me for Christmas and I couldn’t wait to cook out of it! It has lots of great recipes with whole ingredients. Perfect for the freshness I’ve been craving.

This is the first time I cooked with my new camera so please bear with me while I figure out setting etc. I decided to make the asparagus puree. The recipe calls for fettuccine but I didn’t have any so I subbed in brown spaghetti. The asparagus puree is a take off of a classic pesto and I really liked the twist. It was also pretty simple to make.

I shopped yesterday but I had a lot of the ingredients around the house. Note that the asparagus is from Trader Joes. Not my first choice (farmer’s markets are always my first choice for produce) but I couldn’t find it at my usual vendor. Thus, I settled for TJ’s.

For the sake of time and dishes I cooked the pasta while preparing my other ingredients. The recipe calls for the pasta and the asparagus to be cooked separately but I added the asparagus to the pasta water for the last three mins of cooking to save time. Potentially you could also cook the asparagus, drain it, and then cook the pasta in the same pot. Basically, the moral of the story is that I hate doing dishes. I also made two servings because I love leftovers!

While 2 servings of pasta (as dictated by the pasta bag) cooked I prepped 1 clove of garlic, cut 1/4 of a lemon, and cut a handful of asparagus into thirds.

When the pasta and the asparagus were done I drained them in a pasta strainer and transferred the asparagus to my food processor. In addition to the asparagus I added one hand full of fresh spinach, a 1/4 cup of pine nuts, a 1/4 of grated Parmesan cheese, and while mixing I drizzled in EVO as needed.

I mixed it up until it resembled a thicker pesto and combined it with the lemon juice and sea salt to taste. Then I combined the sauce with a small amount of EVO, pine nuts, parm, and the pasta.

Viola!

I played around with flash, detail settings, set ups and zoom. Still getting the hang of it. I do a lot of cooking at night and thus there is no natural light. My tiny kitchen makes it hard to take a picture without having my sink or my stove in the shot. I think I need to make a light box.

Hum. Odd shadow.

Its beginning to look a lot like Christmas edition?

I chased my pasta with this:

I’m beginning to like this more than cocktails. I know that sounds insane coming from me but its true! I am so glad I committed to eating whole foods this week. My system already feels so much better! The stomach pain is gone and I am feeling refreshed and cleansed. Three cheers for limited consumption of preservatives!

Now I’m watching football. My Mom’s side of the family always does a Bowl Pool for the BCS games, affectionately called the Razz Bowl. I am doing pretty terribly this year with only 2 out of 6 right so far. Your welcome fellow participants. Regardless of my poor choices, its been pretty fun so far this year. We had a family rivalry for Missouri vs Iowa and it ended up being a pretty exciting and very close game. Now I’m watching the Music City Bowl which isn’t part of the pool but its really close in the final mins. It just went to overtime after a disputed call in the last second of the game. January first my favorite team (sorry to the UCLAN) is playing. I didn’t vote for Northwestern but for sake of my Brother and Father’s happiness I hope they win.

Who are you rooting for this year? Do you follow the Bowl Series?

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