Pasta – Rosemary and the Goat

Chili Crisp Shrimp Scampi

Another pasta dish for the cooler months to come.

Nothing says you can’t eat pasta in hot weather but this was such a homey dish that I started thinking of the cooler days to come. I think this dish would also be great served cold or even room temperature. It would be great to have it made and in the refrigerator and just pull it out a couple of hours before you are ready for dinner.

So one morning when I’m sitting at my computer planning some upcoming menus which I have done for the last 55 years of married life and I received the link to this recipe from our son Scott (Chicago) and after reading through the recipe I had everything need to make it for dinner that night. I was at the bottom of my chili crisp jar but had just enough to make this dish.

October 4, 2024 By Sherry

Entree/ Pasta/ Uncategorized

Lemon Ricotta Pasta & Spinach

Easy peazy meatless meal!

We love our meats. Whether it’s chicken, pork, beef, fish or or even game like quail, rabbit or venison we want it grilled, bbqd, or roasted as part of any delicious recipe we might find surfing online or something GA might find on YouTube. He watches a lot of grilling and bbqing shows so he is always coming up with something with a little different twist from the norm.

We do occasionally eat a meatless meal; sometimes it is all vegetables and sometimes it is a good pasta dish. Since I have pantry full of different shapes of pasta that I can’t seem to stop myself from buying, I always have the urge to look up a new pasta recipe. That’s when I came across this recipe from theclevermeal.com website and I just knew we would love it. This dish could always be served with some grilled or roasted meat but it’s great on its own and it is so quick and easy to make.

August 30, 2024 By Sherry

Pasta/ Poultry

Chicken Fettuccini with Mushrooms and Asparagus

I love the creaminess of fettuccini!

Lately I’ve been focusing more on afternoon tea parties than the “what’s for dinner” question I get late every afternoon. I love making tea foods and planning the party and it is a lot more work than throwing something together for dinner. But while looking for some ingredients for making a new scone I realized the pantry needed a little TLC.

Seems like I reorganize my pantry every week. Before we moved into our new house and renting a little 850 square foot house, my pantry was a broom closet that my husband converted into a pantry. You wouldn’t believe what I could get into this tiny pantry. Now I have this huge pantry that holds not only food that would last me a year (not really) but every pan and gadget I own and believe me I have a pan for every need. You name it – madeline, donut, barquette molds, flower molds, cannoli forms, Charlotte pan; if you can think of it I probably have it and I have used probably 99% of them at one time. If you ever need a special pan and live close by, you can borrow one of mine.

August 21, 2024 By Sherry

Entree/ Fish/Seafood/ Pasta

Shrimp and Bucatini Primavera

Not a shortage of veggies in this dish!

Love shrimp, love pasta? Love veggies? You’ll love this dish.

I’m trying to work my way through bags of pasta I bought over the last several months. When I get out of town to larger grocery stores and see so many beautiful pasta shapes, I can’t resist buying a bunch. Well I have enough to feed an army in my tiny pantry.

I can’t wait to have a whole pasta section in my new pantry. NEWS: Our slab is being poured this Thursday so once I see those walls go up, I’ll be measuring off my 10×7′ pantry to see what all I can get in there. Presently in our 800 sq. ft house we have been renting for almost three years I have what use to be a broom closet that GA did a great job making shelving in almost every square inch minus room for a broom. So to have a big pantry plus a butler’s pantry and wet bar with storage I will not know what to do with all that space. I will do my best to fill it all up.

May 16, 2023 By Sherry

Entree/ Pasta

Giant Pasta with Baby Zucchini

A use for leftover Charcuterie meats.

After making my charcuterie board on our girl’s trip to Waco, there was quite a bit of meat left over and I just threw it in the freezer when I got home thinking I might use if for our snack one night while having our “front porch cocktails”. Then recently when I was at Cost Plus World Market I bought several of their pastas. Ya know, buying different pastas is my weakness. Well, they had a giant fussily pasta that I thought would go perfect with my baby (the size of your little finger) zucchini that I picked up at Trader Joe’s. And the results were amazing.

I’m only using the prosciutto and the pancetta out of the meats. I wasn’t sure how frying and browning salami would work and I knew I wouldn’t like the mortadella. When I make this again I will have the pancetta sliced a little thicker so I can cube it and then cut the pancetta thin and in threads.

September 15, 2022 By Sherry

Entree/ Pasta

Orecchiette Snap Peas and Italian Sausage

What a combination of YUM!

I just say “little ears” because oh-reck-ee-ET-tay is a little hard say. So let’s cook some “little ears” pasta also know as Orecchiette.

Orecchiette in Italian translates to “little ears”. It’s a small, ear-shaped pasta that originated in southern Italy and it’s the perfect pasta to pair with rich creamy sauces because the little bowl shaped pastas hold all your yummy sauce.

A few weeks ago I was laying under a machine for an hour and half looking at the ceiling while having a HIAD test (gallbladder). Anyway, I’m thinking about this post and what I was going to write about and all these visions of pasta came to mind. Remember Lady and The Tramp movie where the little dogs are sucking the spaghetti and end up at the same end of the noodle and “kiss”. Don’t ask me why that was the first thing I thought of; but then I’m thinking of canned spaghetti “o’s” my kids use to eat when they were younger. Can’t believe I fed that to them.

I have brought back different shapes and colors of pasta from just about every trip we have taken. I packed Italian pastas in my suitcase, chocolate pasta from Pikes Market in Seattle, little tiny squares of pasta for soup that I found in Canada and there is always a special pasta waiting for me in any little specialty shop I might go into.

February 16, 2022 By Sherry

Entree/ Pasta

Bucatini with Spinach, Bacon and Creamy Parmesan Sauce

Who doesn’t love a good pasta dish?

While in Chicago a few weeks ago I made this Bucatini pasta dish. I love bucatini. It’s spaghetti on steroids with a hole through the middle. There are so many interesting shapes and sizes of pasta it is always hard for me to make up my mind what to try next. And I buy pasta wherever I go. I’ve bought chocolate pasta at Pike’s Market in Seattle and brought back some cool shapes of pasta from Italy and France.

The night I made this recipe we served it with seared scallops on top. I made it again after returning home to Round Top and used sliced grilled chicken thighs on top. Both ways were delicious; when I do again I’ll choose the grilled chicken thighs.

This recipe is fairly quick to make with or without the scallops. The only change I made to juliasalbum.com’s recipe was to add sun-dried tomatoes the second time I made this dish. (Note: the sun-dried tomatoes were great)

July 17, 2021 By Sherry

Beef/Veal/ Entree/ Pasta

Beef Stroganoff

Been decades but I still like this recipe.

So you are wondering how many ways can one possibly do beef stroganoff. Well, I couldn’t find many recipes that veered off the traditional recipe.

All I knew when I started this recipe was I wanted to use our leftover delicious bone-in ribeye steak that we had for Christmas dinner. We had bought these steaks and some other meats at Eckermanns Meat Market in Fayetteville (TX) (my now go-to for delicious meats and sliced pork belly that I love).

My daughter, Alexis, had brought me some trofie shaped pasta on her first visit to see us after our move to Round Top. I guess I was complaining too much I couldn’t find certain things that was easy to pick up in The Woodlands. Now I know (I already knew this) if I can’t find it, then I can order it probably from Amazon.

January 10, 2021 By Sherry

Entree/ Pasta

Avocado Pasta with Asparagus and Peas

I love all pasta recipes.

Most of the time I don’t care if the pasta is real (gluten) or imitation (non-gluten); it’s all about the sauce and other ingredients.

Over the years I’ve tried a lot of gluten free pastas and really by the time you put a sauce on it you can’t tell a lot of difference. One thing I did once when I was trying not to eat too much pasta was I made Zucchini Pasta with Pine Nuts and most of the “pasta” was zucchini noodles and I used about a quarter size of whole wheat pasta. That turned out really good because the real pasta kept the zucchini pasta from going too limp and gave it a little more body for holding the sauce. I will do that one again.

I found this Avocado Pasta recipe at wellplated.com. Not sure how I happened upon this but I’m glad I did. I added some chopped fresh spinach to the skillet because I wanted to make sure there was plenty of vegetables and “green” color; it did the trick.

December 11, 2019 By Sherry

Entree/ Pasta/ Poultry

Smoked Mushrooms and Chicken with Pappardelle Pasta

Smokin’ mushrooms! And have a smokin’ happy Thanksgiving.

On the last leg of Canadian trip this past summer we were in Burlington, VT and I had made reservations at a cool restaurant, The Hen of the Wood in Burlington. Well, I thought it was in Burlington and when we had our Uber driver drop us off there was a sign on the door saying they had had a “fire” and please visit their Waterbury location. I had made reservations at the wrong restaurant (never done that before).

After walking around downtown for a while we settled on Pascolo Ristorante and chose to eat at the bar rather than wait an hour for a table. We love eating at bars if there is something interesting going on that we want to watch. I ordered their delicious smoked mushroom pappardelle pasta with marsala cream, rosemary and truffle oil. Like many restaurant recipes it wasn’t hard to come up with a recipe.

November 25, 2019 By Sherry

Entree/ Pasta/ Side dish

Summertime Pasta with Pea Pods and Lemon

Easy pasta dish for the summer.

Don’t you just love pasta dishes for the summer. Pasta cooks in under 10 minutes and everything else that goes into the dish takes a matter of minutes. So, in less than 30 minutes you can have this dish on the table and have time to open that bottle of wine.

This was a Michael Symon recipe that I saw on Food Network. I love buying different shapes of pasta and for this particular recipe I bought a casarecce pasta which is kind of twisted. His recipe called for a cup of mint leaves but I only used 1/2 cup since hub does not care for mint that much.

One other change I will do next time is the cooking of the snow peas and peas. I would not cook. I wanted them to stay bright green and have a little crunch to them so I would recommend maybe sautéing the green onions a couple of minutes then throwing in the peas and pasta and cook just long enough to heat the snow peas and English peas.

August 13, 2019 By Sherry

Entree/ Fish/Seafood/ Pasta

Key Lime Shrimp with Trottole Pasta

Good and bad from Poppycocks…

So, the bad I will get out of the way first. We had dinner one night at Poppycocks in Traverse City, MI and my husband had the worst meal ever. It was cold, the plating didn’t make sense, vegetables looked raw and even after sending it back it still wasn’t good or even hot. In almost 50 years of marriage I don’t think he has sent anything back. The fish had no color and looked steamed and who puts a big chunk of cold tomato under a cooked piece of fish.

Now to the good. I really felt quilty eating my delicious Key Lime Shrimp and Pasta dish. It was so good and the lime flavor was so refreshing. I offered him a bite (only one) which he refused because he was waiting on his plate to be reheated. I think maybe they took the plate back and just looked at it and brought it back. So much for the SPECIAL of the evening.

September 29, 2018 By Sherry

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