A choose-your-own pasta adventure 🍝
Plus some glorious take-out options.
Hello and welcome back to Five Things I Ate! This week, we make pasta à la bodega. Check out past posts here, and please follow my Instagram @fivethingsiate.
Corner store goat-cheese and lemon pasta, levels 1-3, at home
Get the ingredients at your local corner store, and buy some flowers, too.
This simple and delightful pasta is a choose-your-own dinner adventure. At its very simplest, you need only 5 ingredients (including salt and pepper), 15 minutes, and less than 10 bucks. At its most complex, you could serve it to a guest, although it doesn’t get much more complicated or expensive than that. This recipe is based off Smitten Kitchen and makes enough to feed 3 guests for dinner, or 2 Sophie’s, who are endless pits for carbs.
Non-negotiables:
- 8 oz (half a box) of spiral-shaped pasta (Radiatore is my favorite shape and I strongly advocate for this)
- 1 5oz log of herbed goat cheese
- 1 lemon, scrubbed thoroughly
- good olive oil
- salt and pepper
LEVEL 1:
- Bring salted water to a rolling boil. Add half a box of radiatore pasta. Please do not ever use whole wheat pasta. Cook till al-dente. Save 1 cup of pasta water and drain the rest. Crumble in goat cheese, add pasta water to pasta, and stir until a creamy sauce forms. Add zest of one lemon, a squeeze of its juice, a glug of olive oil (about 2 tablespoons), and lots of salt and pepper. Drink with Fancy Water. That's it. That's the pasta.
LEVEL 2:
- add 1/2 a bunch of flat-leafed parsley or other fresh herb you love (mint is very good, too), washed, dried, and finely chopped to the pasta. Drink with sparkling cider, hard or not-hard [https://www.martinellis.com/products/sparkling-cider/].
LEVEL 3:
- Add veggies:
- Slice a zucchini into quarters lengthwise, and then carefully slice into very thin quarter-moons. While pasta is boiling, sautée zucchini with olive oil, salt and pepper until wilted and stir into pasta.
- Or, add 1/2 pound trimmed and cut asparagus to the pasta water, as per the original recipe: https://smittenkitchen.com/2009/05/asparagus-goat-cheese-and-lemon-pasta/
- Top with sea salt. Drink with white wine. It's the weekend now. Celebrate.
“I only have one pan”* string beans with shallots
*No lid, one fork, two cats, and a cockroach.
As the title suggests, I only have one pan in my apartment, which I stole borrowed from my partner’s house. It’s a very nice pan, and oven-proof, which means it’s also my baking sheet. The downside of only having one pan with no lid is that you have to do everything in that pan. The upside is that it turns out you can just do everything in one pan, if you try hard enough. For example, you can make really good string beans à la Thanksgiving, by following this recipe from Ina Garten, if you just add the cleaned and trimmed string beans with a little water in the pan to steam them first, instead of blanching. Just take the beans out afterwards, and sautée two diced shallots in plenty of butter and olive and salt and pepper, and toss the string beans in after.
Petit Ecolier Cookies at Home
Available at most groceries and corner stores.
A little detail that delights me to no end is when coffee shops serve biscuits or a tiny piece of chocolate with your coffee. It always reminds me of my great aunt’s house in Amsterdam. I vowed then, as I still do now, that afternoon coffee in my future home would always come with little sweets. I finally have my ow place now, and the ability to put my cookie plan in place. Petit Ecoliers are sweeter than I remembered -- as are all memories of youth -- but perfect with a cup of milky coffee.
Pad see ew lunch special at Land Thai Kitchen
450 Amsterdam Ave, New York, NY 10024
Approximately every Friday I like to order myself a (originally 10-dollar, but now more like) 12 dollar Thai food lunch combo as a treat. It’s one of the only food bargains you can get in the Upper West Side and Land Thai Kitchen does a wonderful job. I appreciate that they don’t charge extra for beef, that the bits of scrambled egg are sizable, and that when you ask for spicy they indeed make it spicy. It almost makes working from home all day, every day, seem like less of a drag.
Vegetarian Manti at Leyla
108 W 74th St, New York, NY 10023
As a girl who was raised on jiaozi, it’s a very trippy experience to eat these vegetarian manti from Leyla, a Turkish-ish restaurant. They have the same texture as Chinese boiled dumplings (and very good boiled dumplings, I might add, with super silky skins) but the flavor palette is strictly mediterranean (eggplant, yogurt, herbs). They’re absolutely delicious and I looked forward to the leftovers just as much the second day (and they were good cold, too, for the microwave-less like me).
XOXO,
Soph