Showing posts with label parsley. Show all posts
Showing posts with label parsley. Show all posts

Saturday, June 25, 2022

Garlic Lovers’ Pasta by @MysteryMacRae

 


This is another easy, versatile supper dish that uses fresh produce and won’t heat up your kitchen too much on a hot summer day. We use flat leaf parsley. The parsley tastes so good and green, and it's full of antioxidants plus vitamins A and K. Now that we have boatloads of basil coming in, though, we’ll give that a try next week. Asparagus would also be good. Or spinach. Or why not chard? Or, if you’re feeding seafood lovers, you might toss in a few shrimp for them. It doesn’t need a sprinkling of cheese, but when you make this dish, it will be yours, so go right ahead.


Garlic Lovers’ Pasta

Serves 4





Ingredients

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 head garlic, minced

1 bunch flat leaf parsley, roughly chopped

12 ounces pasta (we used rigatoni this time, but also like campanelle and spaghetti)

½ teaspoon red pepper flakes (

Scant teaspoon salt

Salt and black pepper

Optional for serving – a slice of crusty bread or a roll to wipe up the last of the garlic and olive oil on your plate or in your pasta bowl.

 

Directions

Cook pasta according to directions.

While pasta is cooking, heat olive oil, until shimmering, in a skillet over medium-high heat. Sauté the garlic until it’s fragrant and beginning to color. Stir in red pepper flakes and salt. Set mixture aside.  



Drain pasta. Stir the garlic mixture into the pasta, using a rubber spatula to get every bit of that good olive oil and the seasonings from the skillet. 

Add parsley, toss, and serve. 








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.

 

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

The Case of the Cursed Champignons


Bad luck? A curse? You decide...

When we last left our heroine, she had recently enjoyed a wonderful dinner at a Chicago hot spot and returned home determined to recreate the amazing appetizers in her own kitchen. She blogged about the dining experience, asked for recipe input from all of you, and set out on a weekend shopping trip to purchase ingredients for Voul-au-vent des Champignons. Mmm…mushrooms, puff pastry, cognac…

Saturday afternoon she was ready to start cooking when….

Dum, dum, dum…(dramatic music)

Her oven stopped working! The appliance repair guy wasn’t available until Monday—far too late for our heroine to lovingly prepare, photograph, and blog about the dish she’d envisioned without feeling terribly rushed.

What will our heroine do? Stay tuned.

In the meantime, a word from our sponsor:
Congratulations to Ellen, last week’s winner. Our next lucky reader and winner of a $25 gift certificate to Williams-Sonoma will be announced this week, right here, on this
Mystery Lover’s Kitchen station…
-----

Hi,

Sorry, I couldn’t resist the dramatic intro ;-) but that was how the weekend unfolded for me. I spent Saturday morning at my local Farmers’ Market picking out fresh mushrooms, parsley and shallots, planning to make and serve my mushroom appetizer that evening. Fortunately (?) I had something else to heat up first, and that’s when I discovered my oven malfunction.

Oh no! What to do?

Improvise, of course.

I decided that I could probably still make the appetizer but eliminate the puff pastry. I headed back out, this time to the grocery store (the Farmers’ Market was closed by then), to find an acceptable substitute. Unfortunately much of the fresh bakery was picked over, but I came home with six mini croissants. About as close to puff pastry as I could get at that point.



The recipe

Many thanks to Avery/Daryl whose Facebook friend Patricia Winton provided a basic plan of attack. I changed things up a bit. Patricia’s recipe called for Tabasco, but Cognac (based on all your suggestions) seemed like a better choice.

4 tablespoons butter
3 tablespoons finely chopped shallots
1 ½ cups fresh mushrooms.
2 tablespoons flour (all purpose)
1 cup heavy cream or a mixture of cream
Salt to taste
Dash of Cognac
¼ cup finely chopped fresh parsley
1 tablespoon finely chopped fresh thyme leaves
(I didn’t have fresh thyme, but I did have a little container of dried thyme Krista Davis gave me when she signed THE DIVA RUNS OUT OF THYME for me. Came in handy!)
1 teaspoon freshly squeezed lemon juice or to taste (oops, I skipped this step!)

Melt the butter over moderate flame
Sir in the shallots and cook for about a minute.
Add the mushrooms and cook until softened.
Stir in the flour and cook for about a minute until the raw taste has gone.
Slowly stir in the cream
Cook until thick.
Add salt, Cognac, parsley, thyme and lemon juice. Stir

As I mentioned, I served this mixture over sliced (and microwave-warmed) croissants and served them to the family (those of us home this week). The verdict: Mixed.

We all loved the mushroom mixture and Curt and I decided it was pretty darned close to the taste of the appetizer from Marche. But we all agreed that the croissant base left a *lot* to be desired. Just looking at it reminded Curt of chipped beef on toast—not very appetizing. Had it been baked in puff pastry, I think the appetizer would have been much more successful.
Because I only used two croissants, and I had mixture left over, we used it as a side for another meal over the weekend. This makes an awesome sauce.
A couple of changes for next time:
I would use a little extra butter
I think 2 tablespoons of flour was too much. The mixture was just a tiny bit too thick. Maybe just 1 tablespoon of flour next time.
I used baby portabello mushrooms. They were great, but I’m eager to try this again with different varieties.

----

The curse continues! When I inserted my camera's memory card into my computer to transfer these pictures, I was standing up instead of sitting down. Shouldn't have made a difference, right? But I was in a hurry and not being careful. I accidentally inserted the memory card into the wrong slot. It slid it too far, too fast. I couldn't get it out. Poking a pencil into my computer didn't seem like a good idea, but I tried anyway. No luck - I just pushed the memory card further in. Then I had a brainstorm - tweezers! I hear you gasping. Don't worry - I shut the computer down first and I cut all power. I realized there might still be a charge left inside, so I did tread carefully, using a rubber jar opener to hold the metal tweezers. Are you picturing this? LOL

I finally got the memory card unstuck enough to be able to tilt my computer tower forward and gently shake it out. Seriously. I swear this project is cursed!!
;-)

I hope you try anyway and have better luck than I did! Let me know how your versions turn out.


Best,
Julie

Julie's White House Chef Mystery series features State of the Onion, Hail to the Chef, and Eggsecutive Orders (coming in January). All from Berkley Prime Crime. Sign up for Julie’s newsletter on her website at http://www.juliehyzy.com/


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