Ad Hoc Arugula and Pasta

[coraa]

Should you have beautiful seasonal arugula*, fresh and crisp and peppery, you should find some fresh, crisp, peppery use for it, like perhaps salad, and ignore me.

* - Or watercress, or mustard green, or sorrel, or other flavorful green.

However.

Should you forget about your beautiful seasonal arugula until it gets a little wilty—not bad, mind you, but a far cry from crisp—you might do this:

Boil up some pasta, whatever kind you like.

Slice some garlic, as much as looks good to you (for me, the vampire-proof woman, half a head), and soften with a bit of salt and a few good pinches of red pepper flakes in olive oil, over medium-high heat.

Add a glug of white wine and simmer until it reduces to a syrupy liquid, or, if you don't know what 'syrupy liquid' means, until there's still some liquid in the pot but barely.

Coarsely chop your somewhat sad-looking arugula or other assertive green, and drop in the liquid. Let cook until thoroughly wilted.

Throw in the cooked pasta. Add a knob of butter and a grating of hard cheese. (Parmesan and aged gouda both work well, but this is not a dish that is likely to be picky, so try whatever you have on hand.) Stir well.

If you have a bit of lemon, squeeze it over the top. If you don't, don't.

Comments

[sollers]

You don't happen to know what the English (and I mean as in UK) term for arugula is? I know cilantro is coriander, and I've come across references to arugula but I've no idea what it is, and it sounds like a good item for our herb garden.

[coraa]

I believe arugula is the same thing as rocket. (Actually I wish it was called rocket here because that's a far more awesome name than arugula.) (Or it might be spelled roquette, especially if a body is feeling continental.)

If rocket is a tender green with a mild but distinctively peppery flavor, then I'm correct.

[sollers]

All of the above, with leaves that look like dandelion only more so, and I have plenty. Oh good.

[coraa]

Oh hurrah!

It's one of my personal favorites, because in the local-farm-produce-box, it's one of the first tender greens I get in the spring, and it lasts well into early summer. (As opposed to kale and cabbage raab, which is available through most of the winter, but which is not a tender green.)

Which means that it's a pleasing herald of spring but something that will be around for long enough for it to be worth developing recipes around.

[sollers]

It's a very useful windowsill plant. I grow it inside my kitchen; if you keep on picking the leaves, they keep on coming, and if it does bolt you can just plant some more - if the kitchen is warm enough for me, it's warm enough for it.

[coraa]

(Also, interestingly, the seed of the plant is called coriander here; it's just the fresh leaf/stem part that's called cilantro.

I'm sure there's a reason for that, but I don't know what it is.)

[sollers]

I think the reason may be where one gets the terms from in the first place. For example, it was a long time (albeit several decades ago) before I discovered that zucchini and eggplants were what we call courgettes and aubergines.

As for the different terms: does that mean that it doesn't automatically occur to people that if they put some coriander seeds in a flowerpot and wait they'll get the nice leafy stuff? I'm wondering because on one comm on lj someone was complaining about not being able to get cilantro in the UK, and if they did make the connection they'd have realised what they were looking at when they saw fresh coriander in the supermarkets.

[coraa]

Yes, I think from personal experience that people don't expect that what they might get from planting coriander seeds is cilantro.

I think part of it is a cultural thing: many West Coast Americans expect to eat cilantro/fresh coriander in Mexican (or in Central/South American) dishes, but coriander/coriander seed is expected to be in Indian (or Sri Lankan, or Thai, or otherwise Asian or Southeast Asian) food. So the divide between the idea of the dried spice and the idea of the fresh herb is one not only of form but also of context, even though the division is artificial (South American cooking uses coriander seed, and Southeast Asian cooking uses fresh coriander/cilantro).

[sollers]

That's interesting, because here the chief use of fresh coriander is the same as coriander seed: Indian etc cooking. My local greengrocer at the moment sells three big bunches of coriander (I can just close my hand around the stems of one bunch) for £1, and if I put them in water as if they were cut flowers as soon as I get home, they stay fresh all week.