A Simple Pasta Template

You can make a delicious and simple pasta dish with ingredients you have in your kitchen. It is a great way to transform vegetables or meat into a really wonderful meal. The key to this dish is that you finish cooking the pasta in the sauce’s sauté pan with some pasta cooking water. When I lived in Florence Italy, the restaurant cooktops were always covered with multiple sauté pans doing this final pasta cooking step.

At Buckman Street Kitchen, we always cook meats and vegetable for the week with no seasoning (learn more about what we call foundational intermediates) so that they can beautifully be used in a dish like this.

INGREDIENTS

Non BSK Pantry items:

• raw or cooked meats such as chicken, pork, pork belly - Chef’s choice

• raw or cooked vegetables such as mushrooms, summer squash, peppers, roasted peppers, broccoli, cauliflower - Chef’s choice

• Fresh or dried herbs such as oregano, basil, rosemary - Chef’s choice

BSK Pantry Items:

• thin pasta or large pasta

• onion / garlic (or any allium you want to use)

• olive oil / grape-seed oil / salt

• grated cheese

• chopped parsley

• italian sausage (an option the chef may choose)

• tomotoes (an option the chef may choose)

• frozen spinach (an option the chef may choose)

• canned chicken or tuna (an option the chef may choose)

COOKING PROCESS

1. Get salted water boiling for pasta

2. If including a raw animal protein, such as Italian sausage, chicken or pork, start by browning the meat on high heat with a bit of grape-seed oil in a large sauté pan. You don’t need to cook the meat completely at this step but just give it some color. Once a bit browned, remove the meat from the pan and set aside on a plate.

3. Drain and discard excess oil from the sauté pan. Use the pan with the browed bits for remaining steps.

4. Sauté until soft and fragrant, onions, garlic (or any other allium you want to or use up) in a generous amount of olive oil. We always seem have a collection of cut-up onions, shallots or scallions in our crisper drawer and this is a perfect way to use them up.

5. Add your additional ingredients in the order the need to be cooked.

   1. raw vegetables such as mushrooms, tomato, summer squash, would go first

   2. browned meat that needs to be finished cooking would go in early

   3. cooked vegetable or pre-cooked meats go in later

   4. greens such as spinach, arugula or escarole would go in very last

6. Continue cooking on med-low heat until everything is cooked as desired. You can add any dried herbs you desire. Dont be stingy with olive oil, the sauce should have lots of it. If sauce is cooked before the pasta is done, just remove from heat.

7. When pasta is cooked one minute less than package instructions, turn heat of sauté pan up to high and transfer the pasta to the sauté pan with tongs or a pasta spoon.

8. Collect about1/2 cup of the hot pasta water and add it to the sauté pan.

9. The pasta and sauce should cook on high heat and until most of the liquid is gone - the bottom the sauté pan should have a bit of a thin, not watery sauce. Once you reach this point, remove from heat.

10. Transfer to a serving dish, drizzle with iliv oil, grated cheese* and chopped parsley and fresh basil if desired.

*grated cheese is generally not used when seafood if included in the dish