NYE Pasta!

Happy New Year!  So glad to make your acquainted 2013, I think we will be good friends.  Of course even new exciting times can have their hick-ups. 

My last minute dinner tonight is this beautiful lemon garlic pasta.  I am quite the fan of the non-tomato based pastas but you have to get comfortable with fat (i.e. oil or butter).    This pasta dish features seared carrots, blanched kale and boiled beets and only used two pans.  A really fun thing to do is boil the beets with the pasta; I know this will result in some nutritional loss but I love the way it colors the pasta.  I sauteed the carrots in coconut oil with cumin seeds, mustard seeds onion and some garlic.  The kale was added to the pasta after the water was drained, allowing the remnant heat and steam  to cook it just a bit.  The trick to a 'butter' sauce  is to basically toss your pasta in a really nice salad dressing, something that has a combination of fat and acid but in this case is heavier in fat. My plan was to just use some olive oil and lemon juice  The tragic mistake . . . I went to add a dash of basil and the top popped off.  If anyone spends enough time in the kitchen you will hit these 'salt shaker top' type catastrophes the trick is learning how to recover.  I had a taste and the problem was the dryness of the leaves and the 'grassy-ness' or the sense that I was trying to make a pesto pasta but messed up.  To cut the grassy aspect I added extra fat and made some of it coconut oil to give a better richness.  I also found the flavor of the basil to be a bit on the over stated side so I cut it with extra vinegar and sued a combination of white for the sharpness and a bit of balsamic to get a sweetness that I thought was needed.  The end result was not what I wanted it to be but I still am going to bed with a happy belly!