Pasta with Chèvre, Arugula, and Walnuts by @MysteryMacRae

 

This is a quick, delicious dish with a creamy sauce. It uses an easy trick to keep the sauce smooth—mix the goat cheese with oil before mixing it with a splash of water. This keeps the cheese from breaking down into a stringy or chalky mess.  

Finding arugula in the grocery store, regularly, is new to me. New in the past five or ten years, anyway. I love it’s biting, strong flavor. But if you don’t love arugula, or don’t have it in your store, spinach or other greens will make a fine substitute. The recipe calls for gemelli pasta, but again, any interesting shape that you have or can get will work.

Pasta with Chèvre, Arugula, and Walnuts 

(adapted from The Milk Street Cookbook by Christopher Kimball)

 

Ingredients 

12 ounces pasta (we used rotini)

Kosher salt

4 ounces chèvre (fresh goat cheese)

5 tablespoons olive oil

Red pepper flakes

4 ounces baby arugula (about 4 cups loosely packed)

¾ cup walnuts, toasted and chopped

⅓ cup finely chopped fresh chives

 

Directions

Cook pasta in a large pot of salted water until al dente. (Every time I type ‘al dente’ I think of the first book in Leslie Budewitz’s Food Lovers’ Village Mystery series – Death Al Dente. Such a clever title.) While the pasta cooks, mix the cheese, oil, ¼ teaspoon salt, and a pinch or more red pepper flakes in a medium bowl, stirring and mashing with a fork until smooth.

 

Drain the pasta, reserving ¾ cup of the water, and return pasta to the pot. Add the arugula, goat cheese mixture, and reserved water to the pot with the cooked pasta. Toss until the cheese mixture is evenly distributed and the argula begins to wilt.

 

Stir in the walnuts and chives. Season with additional salt and red pepper flakes as desired and serve.

 

 

Uh oh, I almost forgot to get a picture of it plated before we ate it all up!

Did you know that I also write as Margaret Welch? 

Margaret is a character in my short stories that have appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. In the stories, Margaret runs a bookstore and loves books as much as I do, so I figure she'd probably like to write them, too. And now she does! She (well, I) write books for some of the series published by Annie's Fiction. The books are sold through a subscription book club, which you can find here. 

The most recent book is Quartzing Trouble, book 11 in the Museum of Mysteries series. It's a story about lost mines, lost treasure, a lost houseguest, and a true story about Robert Louis Stevenson. 

"Wait. Did you hear that?" Scarlett McCormick put her hand on Winnie Varma's arm. They stopped walking toward the special exhibits gallery and listened. From other parts of the museum, visitors' voices filtered to them. Footsteps echoed on the marble floors. "There it is again," Scarlett said. "There's a bird making noises in the gallery." 

"Something's in the gallery," Winnie said, "but it doesn't sound like any bird I've ever heard." 

The Boston Globe says Molly MacRae writes “murder with a dose of drollery.” She’s the author of the award-winning, national bestselling Haunted Yarn Shop Mysteries and the Highland Bookshop Mysteries. As Margaret Welch, she writes books for Annie’s Fiction. Her short stories have appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine and she’s a winner of the Sherwood Anderson Award for Short Fiction. Visit Molly on Facebook and Pinterest and connect with her on Twitter  or Instagram.