Pasta con Broccoli, page 169Well, we finally have a dud.
Isa says up front that this is "simple food," but frankly, it was just boring and bland. I even used twice as much minced garlic as what the recipe called for. To be fair, I did leave out the red pepper flakes during the cooking process, for the girls, and didn't add them in until my serving was on my plate. So I suppose it's possible that cooking the red pepper along with the garlic, thyme, and brothy-wine (or is it winey-broth?) would have lent better depth to this dish.
Speaking of the girls, they thought it was okay, so perhaps it's not fair to call this a complete flop. At least it appealed somewhat to the kid-palate.
See that sprig of basil up there? That's what saved this dinner for El Hombre and me. I added it to the dish purely for photogenic purposes at first, but ended up shredding a few leaves and adding it to the pasta on my plate. That helped tremendously.
I probably wouldn't bother making this again, but if I did, I would certainly bang it up by adding about ten times as much garlic and a handful of the shredded fresh basil.
3 comments:
I don't remember how this recipe is in the book, but I know that when I saw it, I thought it was kind of a "duh" recipe - very close to an old stand-by of mine. The way I do it is lots of minced gallic cooked in once oil, salt, pepper, red pepper flakes, and juice from a lemon. Simple, but usually very satisfying with pasta and broccoli.
Olive, not once! I'm typing on my phone.
You know, I also used to make a similar, simplified version of this back in college, but without the broccoli - I think it was called "pasta rapido" or something like that, from an old Italian cookbook. But again, it had waaaaaay more garlic than this recipe, and I remember it being oh-so-satisfying...
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