Lemon Fettuccine *ala Lynne Rossetto Kasper

I'm an avid fan of The Splendid Table. Listening to Lynne's eloquent culinary advice not only peaks my interest but makes my mouth water. On this week's show, a woman, recently returned from Italy, wanted to see if Lynne could create a recipe for a taste she'd discovered there on a riverboat....a light, lemony pasta.

I fudged Lynne's recipe just a tad (linguine instead of fettuccine) but otherwise, stuck to it.

So for this recipe and its delicious results, kudos to The Splendid Table.
















Listening to the show while cooking




Recipe = Simplicity:
Zest a whole lemon, thinly slice 3-4 cloves of garlic. While your pasta cooks (good quality fettuccine or linguine), warm olive oil in a skillet (medium at most), add lemon zest to the olive oil. After a minute or so add the garlic slices. This needs to get fragrant only, then scoop 1/4 cup of pasta water into the olive oil and watch it make a sauce. This only takes a couple minutes. Then pour in your pasta and fold into the sauce. Cut the zested lemon and squeeze all the lemon juice into your pasta, tossing as you go so the juice doesn't cook. And voila...



The picture doesn't say much but the flavors do.






Afterwards, John was so pleased he washed the dishes...



Posted by Sara

Vegetarian Burritos

So we were driving around, and passing through what we would describe as a small, quaint township, and came upon the local farmer's market, or what remained of it. Farmer's markets are our new weekend hobby, an affair which even I, a staunch morning hibernationist, rise before dawn to attend to. Literally...if you don't make it to one particular favorite market of ours before 7:30, your chances of going home with a fresh dozen of free range eggs are close to nil.

Opposition to Seinfeld-coined "sweatshop eggs" featured in your supermarket at $.10 cents an egg can cost you a couple of hours' sleep if you take it seriously enough. But egg moralism aside, we really enjoy the feeling of being in our local market - schmoozing with the local food growers, bringing home bags of locally-grown, as-good-as-organic produce, drinking fresh coffee from the stand and maybe standing around, eating one of those freshly-baked scones as you peel back the wrapper.

So we plundered the local growers and made off with two bags of peppers - ordinary green and sweet multicolored, and a bag of cherokee purple tomatoes. We had bought some poblano peppers from the superG a couple days before. SO...we roasted all of them under the broiler. I couldn't figure out what temperature to roast at - I started out timidly at around 250 and eventually hit 375.

We chopped those up and laid them in pretty rows beside our chopped up purple tomatoes, made some brown rice and cooked our black beans, to that added some trader joe's poblano salsa, and ground up some fresh cumin seed, sea salt, and chili pepper in a mortar and pestle. All that together in 4 spectacorific vegetarian tortillas made a great lunch.




Posted by Sara

Russian Black Bread Live

Posted by Sara

Preliminary Inspiration

First course: give credit to whom credit is due.

Credit goes to Pop who originally thought of starting a cooking site.

Second course: give credit to our founder.

Credit for founding the blog goes to Sara who decided to "get the wheels in motion" and start foodblogging.

Third course: explain the purpose of our blog.

The purpose of our blog is to share what we're cooking with each other! We will share photos when we can, stories surrounding our domestic culinary adventures, and our corresponding successes and mishaps.

Dessert: Techniques

1. Blogging on What's Cooking will be open to family members who promise to keep their counters clean (let the reader understand) and not adulterate coffee with synthetic additives.
2. Bloggers will sign their names after each post.
3. Bloggers are invited to share food-related thoughts but politely requested not to expound on personal philosophies irrelevant to the kitchen.
4. BSing is allowed but blogger choosing to engage in such activities opens him/herself up to critique on the blogosphere.
5. It will be fun to write about food philosophy as well as share recipes and the aforementioned with one another.

Happy cooking!

Posted by Sara