Real Food- the dilemma of Whole Foods

The big grocery store chains-- Safeway (called Dominick's here in Chicago), Jewel, and their like-- are getting better. They all have certified organic store brands, and certified sections in the produce aisle, as well as the next step up from horrendous meat (i.e. free range, raised without antibiotics, etc. not that I trust the labels). Unfortunately, the big boxes like Target, Meijer and Walmart have stepped right in with grocery sections that are wall-to-wall processed foods at seductively low prices.

Enter Whole Foods. Designed to look like the authentic local groceries that they put out of business, they are staffed by engaged, activist, educated individuals. They are wonderful corporate citizens, proactive not just for local food and green initiatives, but in arts, education, science and civic engagement. They have trustworthy brands, and hard-to-find organic and unprocessed items.

Except.

When Whole Foods moved into Chicago, they appeared to be doing it right. They held meetings. They were accessible. They promised not to shut down locally owned organic grocers and coops. But those shops are gone anyway. And I would have been fine with that, if these shops had closed simply because they couldn't compete with the better selection and prices at Whole Foods (yes, even Whole Foods was cheaper than some of the organic markets, because of the quantities they can buy).

But Whole Foods didn't leave it at that. They bought the organic markets saying they weren't going to shut them down. And then they shut them down.

When some of the food co-ops stubbornly held on, being immune to buy out, since no one owned them, Whole Foods stepped in and got zoning laws changed, forcing them out of their neighborhoods.

Whole Foods is great-- I trust their products. Their prices, while high, are in line with what food should cost, without the Big Ag subsidies that put small farmers out of business. They are one of the last national companies left who put their charity dollars into their local communities. They have amazing staff. They have items available that real food junkies like me simply can't find anywhere else (organic, preservative-free chocolate chips anyone?). It's not so easy finding real food in the city; the mercados and asian markets have wonderful produce, but if it's organic I'll eat my non-organic hat.

In fact, I'm in big trouble right now, because Whole Foods gives charitable support to three of my clients.

But I can't forget that when they moved into the community, they acted like the corporate bullies that their clientele abhor.

Do you shop at Whole Foods? Help me feel better about them!

My good friend Patte brought me this delicious, sauce? soup? side dish? when I badly sprained my ankle last month. I love people who save old copies of Gourmet! I wonder if she got the ingredients at Whole Foods?

Pasta e Fagioli
from Gourmet | October 1993
Reprinted without permission
Can be prepared in 45 minutes or less.
Yield: Makes about 3 cups, serving 2 as a main course

2 slices of bacon, chopped

1 small onion, chopped fine
1 garlic clove, minced
1 small rib of celery, chopped fine
1 carrot, sliced thin
1 1/2 cups chicken broth
16-ounce can white beans, rinsed well and drained
16-ounce can tomatoes, drained and chopped
1/3 cup tubetti or other small tubular pasta
2 tablespoons minced fresh parsley leaves
freshly grated Parmesan as an accompaniment

In a heavy saucepan cook the bacon over moderate heat, stirring, until it is crisp, pour off all but 1 tablespoon of the fat, and in the remaining fat cook the onion and the garlic, stirring, until the onion is softened. Add the celery, the carrot, and the broth and simmer the mixture, covered, for 5 minutes. In a bowl mash 1/3 cup of the beans, stir them into the bacon mixture with the remaining whole beans and the tomatoes, and simmer the mixture, covered, stirring occasionally, for 5 minutes. Stir in the tubetti, simmer the soup, covered, for 10 minutes, or until the pasta is al dente, and if desired thin the soup with water. Let the soup stand off the heat, covered, for 5 minutes, stir in the parsley, and serve the soup in bowls sprinkled with the Parmesan.

Patte’s Note: I cooked the pasta separately to the al dente stage and added it as I needed it. Any small pasta will do. I also ditched the parsley and added 3 c. fresh baby spinach (chopped) at the very end of the boil.

Zombie Corn, flavor, and Sungold sauce

The weird gray mass in my corn turns out to be Corn Smut, aka Ustilago maydis aka Huitlacoche (“wee-tlah-KOH-cheh”), and is apparently edible. Now, I’m a pretty adventurous eater, but frankly, I draw the line at Zombie Corn.

Also made an interesting discovery about the Bloody Butcher from Seed Savers Exchange— every husk has 2-3 ears growing in it, unfortunately at wildly different rates, and you can't harvest the oldest without also pulling the youngest, since they share a husk and a stem. So assuming I can keep ahead of the aphids, I’m going to try leaving these and see if I can get some of these multiple husks all to mature.

One of the interesting things about growing different corn varieties is that different types taste differently. The Bon Appetit is as sweet as candy, no joke. Eye poppingly sweet. The Bloody Butcher has a smoky deep flavor, it tastes roasted even when it’s braised. The Country Gentleman has the "corniest’ flavor so far, which is probably why it’s a popular backyard variety.

This is one of the most interesting things about growing your own food. You rediscover variety in places you've been trained not to expect variety. Different tomatoes have not only different shapes, but also different flavors, sometimes subtle but sometimes dramatic, like the three different corns. Eating three different varieties of cherry tomatoes in a row is as different as eating a bagel and then a cookie and then pasta. All the same basic ingredients, but wildly different flavors.

Sungold Pasta Sauce
1 quart mixed cherry tomatoes, primarily golden
1 bell pepper, red or green, seeded and diced
1 large clove garlic, crushed
large handful white mushrooms, diced

Blanche the tomatoes and pull off the skins. This is tedious, but worth it. I made this without peeling the tomatoes and found the skins to be tough and distracting in the sauce, although my husband didn't mind them. Set the peeled tomatoes aside.

Heat up a couple of tablespoons of olive oil, then add the mushrooms and garlic. Saute until the mushrooms have absorbed all the oil. If you want your sauce to have a mushroomy back taste, add about 1/2 teaspoon of lemon juice and saute until the mushrooms release liquid. Add the green peppers and saute until just going soft. Add the tomatoes and continue cooking until their structure breaks down. For additional texture and color, throw in some unpeeled small sweet red or black cherry tomatoes.

This sauce will have a golden/pale green color, very lovely and unusual.

Serve over your pasta of choice with grated parmesan or romano cheese and a nice woodsy white.

Why people are afraid to cook

I love the web. Open up a search engine, type in "green beans, chard, beets, carrots" and out comes a recipe. Amazing.

Except when you try to make it.

"roast chard in oven until crispy, but not burnt" How long will that take? What will it look like? Should I do anything with it while it's in there?
"slowly drizzle in the oil to emulsify into vinaigrette" Do I just pour it, or do I have to mix it? How hard? How slow is a drizzle? How can I tell it's emulsified? What in the world does that even mean?
" Lay out prepped beets and carrots on a sheet pan and roast in same 400°F oven as the chard until nicely roasted" Again, how long? What constitutes "nicely roasted?"

So there we were with pan-fried mushrooms and green beans, steamed carrots and beets, and sorta kinda crispy chard. Annoyed with the recipe, we turned it into the Nelson Chin test kitchen and came up with:

Scalloped August veggies

2 large Carrots cut length-wise and then into wedges (I never peel carrots, but feel free)
5 Med.-Lrg. mixed Beets cut into wedges and peeled
Today's green bean harvest (we had about a pint), cleaned (i.e., cut the ends off)
1 large portobello mushroom, sliced
3 larges cloves of garlic, smashed and diced

30 large chard leaves, washed and stems removed
olive oil

Preheat oven to 400F/190C

Remove the stems, then clean and chop the chard. Toss in a large bowl with a couple tablespoons olive oil. Spread thinly on a baking sheet (one with raised edges works best) and roast about 25 minutes, or until it is crispy but not burnt (after 15 minutes, start checking it every 5 minutes). Remove from oven and set aside. Turn off oven and allow it to cool down a little.

Prepare a casserole with cooking spray. Scald 1 1/2 cups of milk (4-6 minutes on high in the microwave)

Steam, braise, or roast the beets and carrots until just tender. Saute the green beans, mushrooms and garlic in a little olive oil. Turn the oven back on, at 350F/175C. Put the two veggie mixes into the casserole in two layers. Each layer should be dotted with 1 tablespoon of butter, and dredged with 2 tablespoons of flour. Pour the hot milk over this, cover and bake for 30 minutes.

Serve over fettucini.

Join Hipster Supported Agriculture

We often see and talk about getting kids to garden. From Alice Water's take over of the Berkeley Public School System, to school gardens all over the place; from Michelle Obama's White House garden to the new Kinder Gardens project at the Inadvertent Farmer.

But there's a missing generation here, of urban and suburban young people whose parents didn't garden, but who are entering adulthood with an urgent need to have this skill.

I decided the Kinder Gardens project needs a companion project for young adults-- why wait 20 years for the newest generation to have gardens of their own, when there's an entire cadre of cynical Millennials who need to get their faces in the sun and their hands in the earth. (That's a couple of them enjoying the garden without doing any work.)

Despite our large sunny yard in the middle of Illinois farm country, my own mother never gardened. With the exception of an uncle who owned a Christmas tree farm, in fact, I come from five, yes five, generations of urban dwellers, as does my husband. We are that rare family with no farmers in our ancestry well past living memory. When I started gardening, I did it all from books and trial-and-error. I had no mentors, and started gardening when the internet was still Al Gore's wet dream and social media wasn't even a twinkle in his eye.

So, introducing the HSA-- Hipster Supported Agriculture (thanks to IceMom for the naming idea).

I've begun inviting my twenty-something friends, plus my own kids, and their friends, to come garden with me one or two days a month-- if there are no garden tasks, or the weather is against us, I'll bring them into the kitchen and we'll cook something. In exchange for the labor, and the companionship, I'll send them home with fresh produce or baked goods.

Update: HSA Schedule
Today (4/18): bed prep and bread making
April 26: snow pea 2nd planting, plant out dill
April 30: greens and roots,
May 14- cucurbits, if warm enough, beans
May 30- plant out ornamentals
June 6- solanums, herbs
mid June, TBD- first harvest (snow peas, lettuce, chard, spinach, radishes)
June 27- garden maintenance, harvest

Cooking days: May 2, May 16, June 13, June 27

I hope we can make things like this, my first garden meal of the year:

Pasta in mushroom sauce with winter turnips and new greens
1 pound turnips, diced, plus their greens
8 oz. fresh spinach
8 oz. mushrooms
1 cup half and half, plus 1 cup vegetable stock (for vegan, use vegetable stock only)
1 teaspoon lemon juice
2 T butter (for vegan, use a light oil, like safflower or canola)
parsley, salt, white pepper
your pasta of choice (1.5 cups dry for each diner)

Start the water for the pasta, when it boils use it to lightly blanche the turnips (about 5 minutes, until just soft--they'll cook the rest of the way with the sauce) then the greens (2 minutes). DO NOT DUMP THE WATER. You're going to cook the pasta in it. Scoop out the veggies and set them aside. Keep the water at a light simmer for now, you'll put the pasta in presently.

Slice and saute the mushrooms in the butter until all the butter is absorbed. Then add the lemon juice and saute until the mushrooms release their moisture. Add the parsley, salt and pepper and saute for another minute or so. Add a little more butter/oil if it starts to dry out. Add the cream and reduce it to a thick sauce (about 5 minutes), then add the stock and the veggies. Continue adding stock to keep the sauce at a consistency that you like.

Cook the pasta, spoon it up.

A good enough cook

I call this blog " a common sense cooking blog, for regular people." I started it when my kids moved out, so that they could get the family recipes, and then discovered that I was enjoying figuring out these recipes, so even after I'd managed to post pretty much all of them, I kept going.

Like my garden, I don't really know anything about cooking, despite being, I think, quite a good cook. My baking is a little hit-or-miss still, but I can learn that.

And that's the point.

How good do you have to be to make your own homemade meals for your family?

It's the same thing that struck me when I started participating in gardening communities on line. People seemed to know so much- which plants need acid and which need base (as opposed to my method, which was--that plant didn't do so well with the peat, maybe I'll try bone meal.) How much sun they got. The scientific name, the genus, the family. I'd been growing tomatoes, peppers and eggplants for 15 years before I ever heard the term "solanum." And yet, somehow, I managed to grow tomatoes, peppers and eggplants just fine. Still a little hazy on which ones are the "brassicas" but I figured out the "cucurbits" right away, once I'd learned the word.

I don't know how to make a roux. I can't chop vegetables super fast. I apparently committed a terrible sin by drying my herbs in the microwave (I guess the heat destroys the enzymes, but won't the heat from cooking do that too?) for which I was publicly admonished by some locavore guru (offers sheepish grin, goes right back to microwave drying herbs, because it's fast and space-saving).

I can make a mean veggie lasagna, and tomato sauce from scratch. My chicken soup is to die for and I roll my own dolmades. And yet, one of the favorite dishes that my kids absolutely love is just noodles with butter and cheese. And that's good enough.

Everybody's favorite noodles
Any kind of noodle--spaghetti, pasta, egg, rotini, etc.
3-4 tablespoons of butter
"sprinkle cheese" i.e. grated Parmesan or Romano

Cook the noodles according to package directions; drain, but leave them in the pot. Melt the butter, allowing it to brown very slightly. Add grated cheese to taste, plus salt and pepper. And that's it. You can add a green like broccoli or spinach, but mostly we ate it as is with some peas on the side.

If you want it to be a little more politically correct, do this with your own spaetzel.

Line, Shape, Color, Texture, Tone

After spending the last two weeks fused to my couch to watch figure skating at the Olympics, I've been hearing a lot about the tension between artistry and technique.

Cooking and gardening are like that, too. Technique is important to get the result you want, and each pursuit has an inherent aesthetic that is met even if you don't think about it. Green things are pretty; food tastes good.

But technique alone cannot bring joy, that ineffable element that stills your heart and calms your brain.

Especially in winter, as color becomes more monochromatic, tone and contrast become the main color statements in a garden— black dirt or red branches against white snow, the warmer areas that melt sooner creating lines through the garden, a shoveled path.

In winter you see more clearly the lines of a tree, and the texture of seedpods left for the winter. The dense branches of a shrub, especially if its red or orange or purple berries still hang on, add a contrasting round shape within the lines of the canes or branches, and the overall shape of the bush stands in contrast to the clean lines of architechtural elements like walkways, trellises and patios.

Line can also draw the eye up, an important direction in a small urban garden where you want to find as much space as you can.

In winter you lose scent in the garden, a design element less available to visual artists, but add a dimension of sound. When a snow cover dampens the noise, the rustle of leaves and the trickle of a pond become focal points.

Food aesthetic starts with scent and adds another element not available to visual artists: taste. But it needs to look good too. I made a delicious soup with greens, but you don't want to eat it, because it looks so nasty. The dimension of food to plate, the contrast of texture and shape, all combine to make a meal taste better because it looks good.

I'm not talking about the precarious designs that high end restaurants feel required to make to justify outrageous prices, or the precious dribbles of a teaspoon of sauce (when what you really want is a cupful). Spare me from foodies who view meals as architecture. Food can be art even when it looks like food.

So I'll take a moment now, and combine the line of a spinach fettucini, with the creamy texture of an alfredo, and add a gentle golden color with a little winter squash.

Alfredo sauce with squash, with fettucini and toasted walnuts
• 1 cup pureed acorn squash
• 1 pint heavy cream (half and half will also work, don't tell the foodies)
• 1/4 cup (1/2 stick) unsalted butter, softened
• 1 cup freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano
• parsley, 1 teaspoon dried, or 1 tablespoon fresh, chopped very fine
• one cup crushed walnuts
• fettucini

Cut and seed the squash and roast until soft (about 1 hour in a 350F oven, face down on a greased baking sheet). Puree the pulp until smooth. (Set aside the leftover puree for acorn squash baba ganoush from Jeff Smiths wonderful Our Immigrant Ancestors)

Hang on, don't turn the oven off. Spread a cup of walnuts, lightly crushed (not too fine) on a dry cookie sheet. Now turn the oven off, and put the walnuts in. They'll toast in the cooling oven while you're making the sauce.

Heat heavy cream over low to medium heat in a 2 quart sauce pan. Add butter and whisk gently to melt. Whisk in squash until fully incorporated. Sprinkle in cheese and stir to incorporate. (Reserve some cheese for topping.) Add pepper and parsley. Thin with a little milk, if necessary.

Cook the fettucini per package instructions; drain and mix in the walnuts. Mix in the sauce, and serve, with a little grated cheese.

This made a little over a quart, way more than we needed for two people, so some went into the fridge for a quick meal on some future tired night.

The dilemma of the grocery gardener

We eat really well at my house in the summertime.

Starting in mid-June, with the first harvest of snowpeas, early greens, and radishes, it's fresh food bonanza well into October. I've been known to go weeks without stepping into a grocery store and our food bill drops to less than $2 a day (even taking into account the direct cost of the garden). In a good garden year I can stretch that into November and even December with lardering--preserving, drying, freezing, and modified root cellaring.

But by mid February the bounty is really gone. I don't have the space, harvest, time, or technology to get much past Christmas from the garden. And I hate, I absolutely hate buying produce from the market. It just feels so wrong. I want my food miles and carbon cost as low as possible, but of course since I live in northern Illinois, this is impossible. It doesn't help that I'm not much of a meat eater. I stand in the produce section and I have to force myself to pick up that eggplant. Ugh, I'll think, it probably came all the way from Chile or something, but I really really want lasagna.

Today I bought my garden at the market. Eggplant, broccoli, two kinds of squash. Snow peas, baby peas, corn (the last two frozen). Peppers, tomato sauce. (I almost tried quinoa, but was put off by the admonishments to prep it right "to get rid of the unpleasant bitter taste." Yum.) Just 11 weeks until I might be able to pick something from the garden.

Vegetarian lasagna with roasted peppers
One box lasagna noodles
Romano or parmesan cheese, large wedge, grated
Mozzarella cheese, 1/2 to 1 pound, sliced or crumbled
1 each, large green and red peppers
1 medium eggplant
1 large summer squash (yellow or zucchini, or 1 of each, smaller), sliced thin
1 medium onion sliced very thin
1 pint mushrooms

2 quarts tomato sauce (from a jar, or make your own from canned tomatoes, or really make it from scratch. I used the stuff in a jar today. I'm only human.)

Prepare the lasagna noodles per package instructions. Yes, I know you can get that kind that cooks in the sauce in the oven, but, um, no.

To roast the peppers, quarter them and cut out the seeds and the white part of the spine. Place them face down on a lightly greased cookie sheet (cooking spray will do). Place them on a high rack (not the very top) in a very hot oven (400-450F) and roast for 20 minutes. Let them cool until you can handle them, then peel the blackened skins off. The flavor of roasted peppers is indescribable. Cut into strips.

To prepare the eggplant, cut it into 1/2" (1 cm) or thinner slices. Salt it and let it drain on a paper towel or newspaper for a few minutes, then heavily dredge it in olive oil. When the olive oil is completely absorbed, dredge it again, and then sautee it. Keep adding olive oil until it stops absorbing. Add the mushrooms and saute until they start to change color. Add the onions and saute until the onions are soft.

Start layering with a layer of noodles, then sauce and cheese, then noodles, then sauce cheese and veggies, until you finish with a top layer of noodles. Cover completely with sauce (make sure no noodle is sticking out, or it will dry out), and then sprinkle the remaining cheese over it.

Bake for about 30 minutes in a 350F oven, or until the cheese is lightly browned.

If you really must, you can substitute chopped meat for the eggplant. Make one quart of the sauce a meat sauce.

Tell me this is not how you spend Friday night

Yes. Yes it is. In my defense, while I'm sitting here eating this delicious garden ratatouille in front of the computer, a cake is baking (just a mix this time, but I have homemade pear and pumpkin pulp just waiting for some ideas).

I call it ratatouille, but it's another "what's ready to harvest" meal. Late in the season now, nothing (not even the tomatoes this year) are producing more than a meal's worth each day, so it becomes a creative exercise to see what you can come up with. Tired of stir fry, no pita to go with baba ganoush, the fish I bought is still frozen...

So, stone soup. I have a smallish eggplant, 5 cherry tomatoes and one fist-sized brandywine, a couple of cups of broccoli florets, some carrots, some onions, garlic, chard,and a reddish pepper. In the cabinet, half a bag of fettucini. Sounds like ratatouille to me.


Garden ratatouille

Must haves:
Large eggplant
2-3 tomatoes
large onion, sliced Greek- style*
Red or green pepper (or both)
1 large carrot
2-3 cloves garlic

Also in here:
a couple of green beans
Large handful of swiss chard
broccoli
7 small brussels sprouts, halved

Cut the eggplant into large chunks, place in a deep bowl and drench with olive oil. Mix it well, making sure the olive oil covers every chunk. Salt well and set aside. Soaking olive oil into eggplant is the secret to getting these to come out savory and tender rather than bitter and tough.

Cut other vegetables into slices or chunks. Put the onions and peppers in an 1/8th cup of water in a deep saucepan, saute until all the liquid is gone (including the liquid released by the vegetables), immediately put in the oil-drenched eggplants, adding more oil to keep it from sticking. Saute until eggplant starts to lose its color a little (it will turn greenish and then back to white), then add all the other vegetables. Saute until the broccoli is bright green and al dente.

Serve as a side dish with meat or polenta, or as I did, as a sauce for fettucini or your pasta of choice.

*to cut an onion Greek-style:

Cut off the ends. Balance the onion on one of these cut ends, and slice in half. Place the slice side down. Cut each slice angling in to the center-- never cut straight down. Cutting this way gives you every slice the exact same size.

Everything but the cheese was home grown

Practiced a little "kitchen archeology" a couple of days ago and unearthed a jar of homegrown walnuts from my "uncle of the heart" Lajos, who lives on a small farm in Hungary and brings produce a couple of times a year.

So I went out into the garden and deadheaded my five sweet basil plants (if it bolts, i.e. develops flowers, the flavor changes, so you have to pinch off the flowers at this time of year). Pulled up 5 enormous cherry belle radishes and made a pesto, using walnut oil instead of olive oil. Sauteed some new snow peas from the oregon sugar pods that just started to fruit, a couple of large mustard greens and the radish greens. Added all to a lovely fettucini from World Market (they have really good fettucini), crumbled some more walnuts on top.

As my previous post averred, this is one of the joys of backyard gardening, joined to a fearless approach to cooking. I had never heard of a pesto made with radishes, but I know that pesto is just a "paste" (literal translation) made of vegetables, oil, hard cheese, and nuts. So why NOT a radish pesto?

Radish Basil Pesto Sauce

* 5 medium radishes, diced
* 1/4 cup walnuts
* 2-3 cloves garlic
* 1 cup fresh basil
* 1/4 cup olive or nut oil
* 1/4 cup grated fresh Parmesan

Toast the walnuts and garlic (200F/90C for 5 to 8 minutes).

Place the radishes, walnuts, garlic and basil in the food processor and pulse about 7 to 10 times, until the ingredients are grated, not pureed. Add enough oil to moisten the ingredients and pulse again until blended. My food processor is one of those 3-cup ones, so at this point I moved the pesto into a bowl, but you can mix the cheese right in the food processor if there's room. Add the freshly grated Parmesan and mix it by hand. Taste and season the pesto with kosher salt, as necessary. Don't use pepper with this recipe, as it will mask the peppery flavor of the radishes.

Makes about 2 cups.

Spoon onto fresh, hot pasta to taste. Important that the pasta is hot, because it will soften the pesto. If the pasta is too cool, the pesto will just be in nasty lumps. For additional culinary and aesthetic interest, add sauteed greens and or green beans, diced roasted or sauteed squash, or a diced fresh tomato (or all of them!).

The pesto also makes a terrific condiment for sandwiches.

Ten minutes to yum

One of my favorite things about gardening is walking through when I get home from work, to see what I can harvest, and then figure out what to cook from that. Today I had 2 dozen snow peas, some regular peas I had saved in the fridge, a couple big mustard greens (sliced into strips) and an onion. Sauteed them with a chicken chipotle sausage, then tossed it in the skillet with orzo pasta and boiled the whole thing in a broth I made from carrot greens (1 cup of orzo and 3 cups of broth. Boil until there's just a little liquid left). Add a little cream, seasoned it with dried orange zest and coriander.

More snow peas than you can shake a wok at

The trick to urban subsistence gardening is keeping the yields from overwhelming you. You want to harvest a couple-three meals a day, not 40 all at once, or you either spend all your time trying to preserve things (and store them), or you end up throwing out or giving away too much produce. And as you can see, at this time of year, you get a lot of produce.

I did pretty well this year, largely due to the great management tools at MyFolia.com, which helped with planning out successions.

So, as the title of the post says, I do have an awful lot of snow peas, but the first planting is just about done, just in time for the first of the green beans to ripen. If those act true to past behavior, they should be done just about when the second snow pea planting matures.

But in the meantime, I’ve started running out of things to do with snow peas. (Harvest so far-- about 30 servings.) We’ve had a couple of stir fries and a plain side dish. My son got some, and another impoverished friend just out of college is getting some tomorrow. For the remaining 2 dozen or so in my fridge, I used a altered version of this recipe from Everyday Foods, but didn't have the ingredients. So I used what I had (like all good cooks).

Fettucini with snow peas and salami

12 ounces fettuccine
1 tablespoon butter
1 small onion, finely chopped (1/4 cup)
2/3 cup heavy cream
Fresh snow peas, strings removed
8 slices salami (about 4 ounces total), halved lengthwise and thinly sliced crosswise, about 1 cup
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1/2 cup finely grated Parmesan cheese, plus more for serving (optional)

Set large pot of salted water to boil (4 quart pot)

Meanwhile, make sauce: In a large skillet, melt butter over medium-low heat; add onion or shallot and cook until softened, about 5 minutes. Add snow peas and sauté until bright green. Add cream, salami ; bring to a gentle simmer over medium heat. Simmer 3 to 4 minutes. Add lemon juice, continue to simmer.

Cook pasta until al dente, according to package instructions. (Some fettucinis take only 3-5 minutes. Don’t overcook!) Reserve 1 cup pasta water; drain pasta and return to pot.
Add enough reserved pasta water to thin sauce as desired. Pour sauce over pasta; add Parmesan, and season generously with salt and pepper. Serve immediately; top with additional Parmesan, if desired.