Emo Pasta

Try as I might, I could not coax a good photo out of this pasta. Perhaps she is shy? She is shy and moody. Just look at those colors: intimate yet hesitant.


Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Emo Pasta. Do you remember those remote days (from the late '80s to the early 200s) when we called people emo? Before we thought about hipsters, we called kids with safety pins on their backpacks and chips on their shoulders emo...because saying "emotional" took too much effort. I don't know why, but this pasta feels like the Dashboard Confessional of comfort dishes. I hear it whining, "Maa! Leave me aloooone!" as it hides from the world under a pair of battered Skull Candy headphones. In other words, this introspective dish is perfect for fall, when we all pull back into ourselves and prepare for the cold times ahead.

This recipe leans on the last of your summer harvest and also brings in first of your preserves: tomatoes dried to chewy perfection in the oven, pesto from the last batch of basil you picked before frost appears in the mornings. Summery preserved lemons tumble brightly over winter kale. Buttery toasted walnuts round everything out.

I recommend creating your own oven-dried tomatoes from the last of your summer crop (or the last batch of good farmer's market tomatoes.) Wait until the next gloomy, rainy day that rolls around to make them. Just halve a dozen tomatoes, sprinkle them with salt, and bake at 300 degrees for four hours. Your oven will keep the house snug and warm while the tomatoes fill the kitchen with tomatoey fragrance.

As the tomatoes roast, you could set up a new jar of preserved lemons or take a walk in the October woods. Feel the pine needles crunch underfoot. See the leaves change before your eyes. Listen to the Smiths when no one is looking.

For those of you without woods nearby, you can walk in Portland's many parks and forests through my friend Stacy's blog: Weekend Walks from a Dog's Point of View. See the neighborhoods of our city through the lens of Nelly the dog--cats hiding on porches, dewy leaves, towering oaks, shimmering spider webs. By the time you've finished your fall walk--whether real or virtually--this pasta will be waiting, reluctantly.

Where is my Mead Composition Notebook?

Emo Pasta (aka Screaming Infidelities Pasta)
serves 4-6

• 1 box curly pasta (like fusilli)
  
• 1 cup home-made basil pesto, like this
  
• 1 cup fresh kale
• 2-3 Tb. lemon juice or water
  
• slow-roasted tomatoes like these
• 1/2 cup walnuts
  
• 1-2 wedges preserved lemon
• freshly shredded Parmesan to taste
• red pepper flakes to taste
  

Phase 1: toasting the walnuts

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Arrange walnuts on a cookie sheet in a single layer, then bake for eight to 10 minutes, checking frequently. The walnuts should reach a light-golden brown and smell quite fragrant. Remove the walnuts and let them cool.

Phase 2: cooking pasta and prepping vegetables

Bring a large saucepan of water to a boil, then toss in the fusilli. Reduce the pasta to a rolling boil while you prep the veggies.

Using kitchen shears or a sharp knife, cut/slice the dried tomatoes into thin strips. Set aside. Dice a wedge or two of preserved lemon and set aside.

Wash the kale with cold water and pat dry with a towel. Chiffonade the kale: roll it into a big cigar, then slice it diagonally into thin strips. Toss the kale strips into the bottom of a pasta strainer. When the pasta is al dente (cooked through but firm to the tooth), drain it over the kale. This cooks the kale enough to turn it a vibrant green without cooking out those delicious vitamins and enzymes.

Phase 3: Profit!

Turn the kale and pasta out into a large mixing bowl. Toss in the walnuts (you may crush them a little with your hand for presentation/stress relief), sliced tomatoes, preserved lemon, and red pepper flakes. Stir in pesto and lemon juice until all of the curly little noodles are well coated, even a bit soupy and saucy. Adjust the amount of pesto and lemon juice to taste. Stir in 1/3 - 1/2 cup of fresh Parmesan and serve.

If you liked this post, you might also enjoy:
Radish-top basil pesto
Rigatoni with red pepper cream sauce
Cherry chili chocolate chip cookies

Foodie Adventure 3: can it and bake cobbler

A few weekends ago, on the hottest day of the year in Portland, Lauren convinced me to drive to Sauvie Island and pick fruits and vegetables for canning. Why should we can food in my unconditioned house when it's over 90 degrees outside? Because Lauren and I are insane. When you combine her quest for Portland foodie adventures with my What Would Ma Ingals Wilder Do? compulsions, we're impractical and unstoppable.

I think we also wanted to chase away the specter of the day: the 10th anniversary of the September 11th attacks. We needed to soak up the sun, to spend time outside remembering that we were alive and that life is still good, even though a group of people did terrible things ten years ago.


We drove to Sauvie Island Farms--just 10 minutes north of Portland--with visions of blueberries and peaches dancing in our heads. Lauren wanted to can fresh peaches; I had my heart set on making both blueberry and peach preserves. Any hopes of finding summer fruits were dashed when we reached our destination, though.

See that peach? It was pretty much the only ripe-ish peach in the whole orchard. The ladies working the farm stand said we missed the best pickin's by a few weeks.

We focused instead on veggies. We picked pickling cucumbers and lemon cukes, zucchini (and zucchini blossoms as big as your hand), cauliflower, broccoli and corn.

Can you find the Kate in this picture?

Lauren and I still picked a dozen half-ripe peaches--beginning to blush pink on the outside, but still a few days away from softening into ripeness. (We had our hearts set on peaches, dammit!) We put them in a paper bag and left them alone until it was canning time.

Thank goodness we also stopped by Kruger's Farm Market down the street. They supplied all the fresh peaches, tomatoes, and blueberries we needed for canning....plus a fresh crop of tart apples. Lauren and I gave ourselves credit for "picking" this produce, since we purchased it on the property of a market that also doubled as a "you pick" farm. I'm glad we stopped by and bought more peaches here because, when I checked on the Sauvie Island Farms peaches two days later, they'd turned into squishy black fuzz-covered meteors in their paper bag. Tasty.

Prepping jars with cinnamon and a little citric acid

We canned the (non-black, non-moldy) peaches from Kruger's with cinnamon and a pinch of sugar. Lauren had the brilliant idea of throwing an entire cinnamon stick into each jar. Not only did the peaches taste lovely--each kissed with just a little bit of cinnamon--but they looked lovely in their jars, with the peach slices bobbing above the cinnamon stick below.

Lauren and I canned like crazy in that cramped, air-conditioning-free kitchen until after midnight. We listened to blues, country, and Motown. (Did you know that the Dixie Chicks complement The Supremes? And that Moreland and Arbuckle round them both out nicely?) We put up jam, over a dozen jars of pickles, peaches, cauliflower, and sweet corn relish. Even after an entire evening of canning, we'd barely processed half of the fruits and veggies we'd purchased.

We reconvened several days later for more canning: tomatoes with herbs from my patio garden, pickled daikon-and-carrot relish for Bánh mì sandwiches, and blackberry-blueberry "bruiser" jam. I'll be sharing some of our recipes over the next few days. Lauren will also feature a few on her website, Sinful Misadventures.

Lauren Flemming, Canning Goddess!

We learned many things from our canning adventures:

• Canning tongs (pictured above) are the best $4 you'll ever spend on canning supplies. I'd been burning myself for years by trying to use regular tongs to remove the hot jars from the boiling water bath. (Canning is pain!)
• The "pop" of a jar lid sealing itself, locking in deliciousness and locking out bacterial contamination, is one of the sweetest sounds on earth.
  
• Friends and family members who return your jars after you give them canned goods as gifts are worth their weight in gold.
  
• There's something empowering about preserving food you picked yourself, that same day, with a friend.
  

Before I break out the lengthy and comprehensive details about what we canned and how, I'd like to share something else with you: a recipe for the blackberry cobbler that sustained us as we chopped, preserved, and processed. You'll want a snack to tide you over when you can on your own.

Before baking 'till golden and bubbly.

I've been picking blackberries all summer. There's a sprawling patch of brambles less than a block from my apartment, something that just about every resident of the Pacific Northwest can boast. I've been picking a giant bowlful once a week since July, which means my freezer is FULL of quart-sized bags of fruit. Whether you use frozen berries or fresh ones--I've seen a few patches around the neighborhood still putting out fruit, this cobbler bakes the blackberries into thick, gooey submission.

Lauren, Raymond and I enjoyed our cobbler hot from the oven, with plenty of vanilla ice cream.

Double crust, double cinnamon, double good

Blackberry cobbler with double-cinnamon topping
heavily adapted from the Better Homes & Gardens 10th edition

• 1/3 cup sugar
• 1 Tb. cornstarch
• 4 cups fresh or frozen blackberries
• 1 Tb. fresh lemon juice, plus lemon zest

• 1 cup whole wheat pastry flour
• 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
• 1 1/2 Tb. sugar
• 2 tsp. baking powder
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 4 Tb. unsalted butter, cold
• 3/4 cup milk or buttermilk
• 2 tsp. cinnamon

Preheat your oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit.

In a 2-quart saucepan, mix 1/2 cup sugar and cornstarch. Stir in the blackberries, lemon zest, and lemon juice. Cook over medium-high heat for about 5 minutes, stirring constantly, until the mixture thickens and boils. Keep stirring the blackberries while they boil for another minute. Pour the blackberry filling into a 2-quart ungreased casserole dish.

Mix together flour, sugar, baking powder, salt and cinnamon in a medium bowl. Cut in butter using a pastry blender or crossed knives until the dough is reduced to fine crumbs. Stir in milk slowly, until just combined.

Drop the dough on top of the blackberry filling in generous spoonfuls (but don't drop the dough so forcefully that you burn yourself with blackberry filling. Not that I did that.) Bake the cobbler for 25-30 minutes, or until the topping is golden brown. Serve immediately.

If you liked this post, you might also enjoy:
Foodie Adventure 1: Beast
Foodie Adventure 2: DIY Coffee Roasting
Drunken berry cobbler
Cranberry-peach salad with ginger

PS: The photos in this post were taken with Lauren's insanely awesome Canon Rebel.