Cooking to Save the Planet: Pasta with Pecans, Cauliflower, and Carrots

From the sublime to the ridiculous: or is it precisely the opposite? I need these creative-diversionary reflections to balance the ugliness being enacted by many of my fellow Christians and fellow Catholics these days.  Enacted out right over the prone bodies of the gay and lesbian brothers and sisters many of my fellow Christians (and fellow Catholics) need to humiliate and hurt in order to assure themselves that they're among the good and righteous.


So to the sublime: this is a recipe I've shared before.  At least, it's a version of it.  I share it again now (I share a slightly different version of it, that is) because it illustrates a point I want to keep making when I post these pieces about cooking to save the planet.  

The point being that one can (and should) cook healthy, nutritious, and tasty meals with the ingredients one happens to have on hand in a reasonably well-stocked kitchen.  Combined creatively.  Using what's seasonally available.  These are points I hope to keep emphasizing in this sporadic series of postings on cooking to save the planet, since, as I've said previously, I suspect that the traditional kitchen wisdom on which these insights rest has tended to get lost for a generation or so raised on unhealthy fast food in the U.S.

The previous version of this recipe I posted back in September 2010 was a recipe for pasta with walnuts and cauliflower.  And here's what made me cook a slightly different version of this dish two days ago:

As I mentioned in a posting yesterday, Steve and I had taken a short trip to Salt Lake City week before last.  We brought along some items from our pantry to cook while we were away from home.  They included a pound of bowtie pasta.  In Salt Lake, we bought a cauliflower and a package of carrots to eat with bread and cheese at lunchtime.  

The leavings of the cauliflower--a bag of florets--and of the carrots--a bag of carrot sticks--came along on the plane with us, and we nibbled those in flight.  And still had a good handful of the florets and the carrot sticks with us when we got home . . . . 

And so two days ago, I cooked the half bag of bowtie pasta we ended up shlepping back home, as I sautéed in some olive oil the cauliflower florets, the carrots (diced), a small onion cut into strips, and several toes of garlic minced.  I added a handful of pecans we happened to have on hand, since Steve's brother had picked up pecans last fall in the yard of the house in which he lives, and I had finally faced cracking them a few weeks before our trip--a task I hate doing, but one that I can do mindlessly while watching mindless television.

All of this, with a good bit of fresh black pepper, some pinches of Italian herbs, and a pinch of cayenne pepper.  At the end, as the vegetables became tender, I also added a good handful of chopped flat-leaf parsley, the stems of which I threw into the pot of boiling pasta along with several bay leaves to flavor the pasta.  And, of course, I fished the parsley stems and bay leaves out of the pasta before I drained it and mixed it with the vegetables.  

As the vegetables sautéed in the olive oil, I added a dipper or two of the water in which the pasta was cooking when the vegetable mix threatened to become too dry.  When the pasta was al dente, I drained it and mixed it with the sautéed vegetables, and then tossed the whole with some grated parmesan cheese.

And that was our meal, with a salad made from fresh asparagus quickly steamed and served in a vinaigrette sauce with a soupçon of Creole mustard and garlic added to it.  (Speaking of asparagus, we had lunch Sunday before last in a dim sum restaurant we like in Salt Lake City, and one of the dishes the exceptionally genial waitress offered us was a plate of fresh stir-fried asparagus, which she told us the restaurant had bought that morning from a local organic farm.  

I had forgotten how delicious really fresh asparagus can taste, when it has just been harvested and simply prepared.  Brought back happy memories of my grandmother's asparagus bed, in which the asparagus grew interspersed with irises and intertwined with mint when I was a child.  And how my grandmother never complained when we children snapped off the tiny spears and ate them right out of the garden--how, in fact, she relished our discovery of how delicious they could taste then and there in the warmth of the early morning sun, as bumble bees buzzed in her bee bushes and hummingbirds visited the irises.  Good memories).

All these memories and food tips offered with love today to readers who so constantly feed my hope, when hope falters--as, I'll freely admit, it begins to do in the last several weeks for me.  I can think of few times in the past in which so many of my fellow Catholics have seemed so intent on putting on such an ugly face to the world around them.  All in the name of God.

(It hurts.)