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.

[tedeisenstein.livejournal.com]

Somehow, I suspect that if someone knows how much wine is in a glug and how big a knob of butter is, they'll know what consistency syrupy is. (...and exactly what "to taste" tastes like, too!)

This is a recipe designed to drive engineers nuts.

[linley.livejournal.com]

I made a similar arugula sauce to mix into risotto once. It was fantastic. The arugula I have currently is still crisp, however, so it will continue to become salad (most recently arugula and spinach salad with Indian-spiced chickpeas and charred red onions).

[dancambull.livejournal.com]

My greens clumped all together in the middle and I wondered if it was the type of noodle I used. What type of noodles did you use? Also, I added some caramelized onions while the wine was cooking down (I made them earlier for steak sandwich).