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Private lunch for the lucky few
Salumi, the tiny storefront and deli in Pioneer Square, is probably one of the most well-known restaurants in Seattle. That could be because their house-cured meats are out-of-this-world good, or because it’s run by a family with the last name of Batali (as in Mario). Foodies, local workers and tourists on their way to Sea-Tac wait in hour-long lines for their sandwiches, sometimes lining up at 10:30am just to make sure the legendary porchetta doesn’t run out.
The sandwiches are justifiably amazing, but Salumi also offers a more private, sit-down experience — as long as you have a half-dozen friends willing to join you and are proactive enough to book two months in advance. This is the Salumi “backroom lunch”, a private five-course meal for 8-10 people served in the small backroom of the restaurant. It’s only offered on Wednesdays and Thursdays, and for $40 per person (plus tax, tip and wine) Chef Bryan cooks whatever he’s feeling that’s fresh. You just sit back and eat for three hours.
Spurred by a query by Jeremy on Twitter back in January, a group of friends booked a meal for a couple weeks ago. Wine bottles in hand, we breezed past the hungry lineup for the sandwich counter and settled in at our reserved table in the backroom.
First uncorked was a bottle of Carabella 2007 Pinot Gris (thanks to Frank), while we snacked on some appetizers laid out on the table. There was a platter of some of Salumi’s cured meats, like salami, prosciutto and the mole salami, as well as their house-spiced olives and fresh baguette.
Meaty goodness
Once everyone arrived, Brian brought out some lardo-wrapped breadsticks. Lardo is cured pig fat, served warm so it melts on your tongue. He thoughtfully brought out a plate of leftover scraps as well.
So porky
While we tapped into the house wine, Farnese Montepulciano d’Abbruzzo, Brian started bringing out the first courses. Surprisingly, given the meaty focus of the restaurant, he presented us with platter after platter of vegetables. First came out balsamic mushrooms and cipollini onions, cooked until tender and sweet. Then came baby artichokes with parmesan and green beans in pesto.
Naturally, pork was not completely absent from the vegetable parade. One of the best dishes was sauteed Brussels sprouts with guanciale (pork jowl), and asparagus stalks arrived wrapped in prosciutto.
Guanciale makes Brussels sprouts happy
At this point, someone at the table mentioned they’d seen a sign out front offering chicharrones (fried pork skins). Apparently they only offer it rarely, about 10 times a year total, when they have it in stock. Brian kindly brought out a plate full of the warm, crispy, porky goodness for us all to share. These bites were like essence of pork and COMPLETELY addictive.
Chicharrones!
We then tried to take a moment to take photos, but Brian said “gnocchi waits for no one” and delivered a massive platter of gnocchi with sage “made by Mario Batali’s mom.”
"Gnocchi waits for no one"
The main course — and yes, we were quite full at this point, but soldiered on — was a beautifully presented dish of Vermouth chicken with leeks and broccoli rabe. I would love to learn how to make this myself. The chicken was tender and immensely flavorful, and the slight bitterness of the broccoli rabe was a nice counterpoint to the sweetness of the caramelized leeks.
A truly dominating spread
Finally, as several of our party tapped out and went back to “work”, we finished off the meal with a not-too-sweet dessert of red wine-poached pears with chestnut ricotta and honey. Light yet complex, it was the perfect coda to an epic, unforgettable meal.
The perfect finish
We promised more detail in the last post about how we’re eating these days, so here’s the backstory. As you may know, we’ve been doing Crossfit for several months now, as Jeremy first wrote about back in June. We’ve grown to be strangely addicted to the 30 minutes (and sometimes 45, or 60 or — shudder — 75, depending on the instructor) of all-out, kick-your-ass workouts. We’ve upped our visits to the Crossfit torture center to three times a week, and do Crossfit-style workouts on our own or, for Jeremy, while he’s traveling for work.
We definitely feel stronger and more in shape since doing Crossfit. But the exercise part is really only half of the equation. The other part is what you eat. For months, Jeremy had been trying to convince me that we should “go Paleo” and complete the nutrition part of the program. I was skeptical. I figured working my butt off at Crossfit gave me the leeway to eat whatever I wanted — macaroni ‘n cheese with bacon is guiltless after you’ve just destroyed yourself doing Fran! Plus, anything that didn’t let me eat bread…or cheese…or rice and beans…yeah, as someone who can’t stop thinking or talking about food, I wasn’t having it.
But right around New Year’s, we were chatting with one of our instructors and he mentioned his New Year’s resolution was to go Paleo for six weeks. Maybe it was because we had just gorged ourselves while in Austin, or maybe it was the post-workout buzz going to our heads, but for some reason six weeks sounded doable. We started that night with a dinner of roasted salmon and sauteed spinach and haven’t looked back since.
That’s right. Since Dec. 30 or so, we’ve been 95% (allowing for the occasional unavoidable rule-breaking) free of dairy, grains and legumes. And we feel really, really good.
Speaking for myself, the gastrointestinal discomfort (sorry for the imagery) that I used to battle constantly has virtually disappeared. I don’t feel sluggish or weighed down like I used to after eating a croissant or pastry in the morning. We’ve both lost weight, though it’s hard to say how much since we don’t own a scale and that wasn’t the goal of this decision. Overall, we both feel lighter, leaner and just better about what we put in our bodies.
Okay, so slow down. What is Paleo exactly, and why would anyone do it?
While it’s gaining traction in the mainstream media recently (a recent Washington Post piece was a well done, while a New York Times Style story made it sound extremely douchey) the Paleo lifestyle isn’t a particularly new idea. While I really hate calling it a “diet” because diet to me implies the goal of losing weight, The Paleo Diet website has a good explanation of the basics behind the theory:
With readily available modern foods, The Paleo Diet mimics the types of foods every single person on the planet ate prior to the Agricultural Revolution (a mere 500 generations ago). These foods (fresh fruits, vegetables, lean meats, and seafood) are high in the beneficial nutrients (soluble fiber, antioxidant vitamins, phytochemicals, omega-3 and monounsaturated fats, and low-glycemic carbohydrates) that promote good health and are low in the foods and nutrients (refined sugars and grains, saturated and trans fats, salt, high-glycemic carbohydrates, and processed foods) that frequently may cause weight gain, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and numerous other health problems. The Paleo Diet encourages dieters to replace dairy and grain products with fresh fruits and vegetables — foods that are more nutritious than whole grains or dairy products.
In other words, eat meat, vegetables, fruits, nuts and seeds, and lay off the grains, dairy, processed foods and carb bombs.
This has not been as difficult as you would think.
First thing we did was to throw away or hide away all non-Paleo foods in our apartment. The next thing was to go to the grocery store and stock up on things we could eat: lean meats and fruit and vegetables, but also things like coconut milk, almond flour and sunflower seed butter (ADDICTIVE). Many recipes in our current cookbooks are or can be made Paleo-friendly, but there are thousands of Paleo recipes online on dozens of Paleo and Crossfit blogs as well (I’ll share some of our favorites in future posts).
It’s cut down on our dining out habits, which is an excellent step financially. But even eating out is not an obstacle at most restaurants. Pretty much everywhere will sell you a big entree-sized salad with some kind of protein on it, and given the rise in allergies in recent years most establishments are sensitive to wheat-free or dairy-free needs.
While technically alcohol is not Paleo, a glass of red wine once a week is considered acceptable. If you “have” to drink, tequila and clear liquors are the way to go — in fact, apparently some bars now sell a version of a margarita called a “Paleorita.”
Are we perfect Paleo? Of course not. I mentioned 95% earlier, which allows for the occasional “don’t ask don’t tell” situation at a restaurant where we don’t scrutinize too closely how those coconut shrimp were prepared. And there have been a few times where circumstances made it virtually impossible to adhere to the rules. But for the most part, we’ve stuck to the plan.
And we’ve stuck to it not because we feel mutually obligated or because it’s some silly resolution, but because it really does feel better. I can’t say that I’ll eat this way for the rest of my life, but for right now it works for me and it’s easy to do. I’ve eaten pretty much whatever I wanted my entire life up until this point. It’s worth it to us to see what happens when we try eating more consciously.
Do you think we’re crazy? Do you want more information? Are you wondering why I wrote 1,000 words on this? (Me too.) Feel free to share in the comments. In the meantime, I’m looking forward to some of the delicious recipes I’m planning to share soon.
A sampling of cookbooks
If you grew up cooking or in a family of people who cook, like I did, I bet you have That Cookbook. The one you always grabbed when you needed to make something special for dinner, or needed to check the best way to make a certain dish, or wanted to flip to the old standby recipe that was guaranteed to produce that one familiar meal.
For me, or at least how I remember it, that cookbook was The Silver Palate Cookbook. Sheila Lukins, one of the authors, died this week. Reading about her life and the way her cookbook expanded the culinary horizons for so many American home cooks in the 1980s made me think about just how significant a cookbook can be. Reading Twitter, you would have thought everyone owned this book! It was either their first, or the one that taught them to “cook like a grown-up”. Seeing this, it’s logical why it was so popular in my house growing up in the 1980s and 1990s.
Thinking about cookbooks got me thinking about the ones I use regularly. We don’t own too many, as I try to resist the urge to buy every cookbook that catches my fancy and because the Internet is such a wealth of resources what with Epicurious and all the numerous food blogs I am addicting to reading.
But we do have a few favorites, and as I was thinking about our little cooking library I realized that each one has some special significance for me. Here are a few selections of what we’re cooking from, and why.
How to Cook Everything, by Mark Bittman
This is my Joy of Cooking and my non-Internet encyclopedia. It was one of the first cookbooks I got when I moved out on my own (Silver Palate was the other) and it is battered and worn after just a few years of service. This cookbook is great because it doesn’t make me feel stupid when I realize I don’t know how to soft-boil an egg or cook beets. Plus, it’s really entertaining reading material in its own right.
One Pot Spanish, by Penelope Casas
We got this at our favorite cooking store, The Spanish Table, and are smitten with it. Anything Spanish is a win for us, and everything we’ve made from this so far has been delicious. The favorite is the Tomato, Chorizo and Homemade Pasta Stew.
Classic Rachael Ray 30 Minute Meals and Rachael Ray Express Lane Meals
I know what you’re thinking: R-squared? Seriously? But one thing Rachael Ray does, for all her annoying perkiness, is give you confidence in the kitchen, and when we were just venturing into cooking for ourselves she was the perfect launching pad. Plus, Jeremy gave me the Classic 30 Min. Meals as a Hannukah gift the first year we were together, so I will always think of it as particularly special.
Tapas: A Taste of Spain in America, by Jose Andres
Have you been to Washington, DC? Have you eaten at Jaleo’s? If not, go do that, and then come back and finish reading. Jose Andres is the chef at this tapas destination, which Jeremy introduced me to when we visited DC and where we’ve had some of the most perfect tapas ever. Getting his cookbook was a no-brainer, and the recipes are surprisingly easy and practical for home cooking.
Seven Fires: Grilling the Argentine Way, by Francis Mallman & Peter Kaminsky
We’ve mentioned this book before, but we’re really pretty infatuated with it right now. Gorgeous photos, lyrical writing, and compelling recipes based off simple ingredients. Not sure we’ll venture to cook the whole cow any time soon (yes, that’s a recipe in there) but the delectable Pork Loin with Peaches will tide us over. It makes me want to go to Argentina and build a massive wood firepit on our tiny patio.
That isn’t everything, as you can see from the picture, but those are the ones that resonate for me right now. What are your favorite cookbooks? Which ones mean the most to you?
Last week I attended a screening for the documentary The End of the Line, a film to be released later this year that details how overfishing is essentially eradicating every single species of fish from the ocean.
Held at the W Hotel in downtown Seattle, it included seafood hors d’oeurves (all sustainable, of course) like smoked salmon, oysters and geoduck ceviche. The food was fine, but the movie was what left an impact.
If fishing continues at the same pace, scientists predict there will be basically no fish left in the sea by 2048.
2048. That’s well within my lifetime and that of almost everyone I know.
We’ve blogged before about the film Food, Inc. and how jarring that was. But this film was even more upsetting. Maybe it was because it taught me so much I didn’t know. Like that bluefin tuna are being overfished so far beyond the suggested quota that they are on the verge of extinction — yet restaurants like Nobu continue to serve it on their menus, the equivalent of selling orangutang or white rhino. Or that unagi, or eel, one of my favorite dishes to order at sushi restaurants, is 95 percent extinct.
It was shocking, and it made me wonder what I can do to avoid being part of the problem. Like in Food, Inc., the film recommends letting money talk – buying sustainable seafood and asking your fish provider where the fish came from and how it was caught. I also picked up a fish guide that lists what the best, okay, and worst options are for buying and eating seafood. Sustainable Sushi is another great resource. And it turns out that local organic grocery chain PCC is one of the best places in the country to buy fish you know is sustainable.
It’s a good thing we like anchovies, because along with sardines and mackerel, those are some of the best fish you can eat: low on the food chain, full of Omega-3s, and abundant. They’re also cheap, which shows that eating sustainable seafood doesn’t have to be prohibitively expensive at all.
So the good news is that there’s reason to be optimistic, if people are aware about the issues of eating a lot of seafood out there. I would like to still be eating salmon 40 years from now. Wouldn’t you?
Half-eaten paella
For some inexplicable reason, I was feeling adventurous today. Part of the impetus was a recipe for paella in Jose Andres’ bible on Spanish Cooking: Tapas, a Taste of Spain in America. As a former D.C. resident, I can speak in reverence of Jose’s skills with Iberian ingredients in the kitchen. His flagship Jaleo restaurant is, in my opinion, the end-all, be-all tapas destination in the United States.
So I decided I wanted to cook paella, even though I have never cooked it before. Culinary suicide, I know. Paella can be a finicky dish. If you eff up the rice, for example, it’s ruined.
Undeterred, I made a trip this afternoon to The Spanish Table, an Iberian specialty shop located on Western Ave. near Pike Place Market in downtown Seattle. The shop focuses on Spanish goodies, but there’s also ingredients with Portuguese and Moroccan flavors. Basically, my head exploded. I grabbed a basket and loaded it up with gazpacho (chilled tomato soup), sofrito (sauteed sauce with tomatoes), smoked sweet paprika (staple flavor of Spanish dishes), Valencian rice and some European candy. The hallmark of my haul, though, was a cazuela. It’s a terra cotta dish, perfect for cooking one-pot type meals over low-to-medium heat.
Originally, I planned on picking up a paella pan, which is a large metal pan with a flat bottom. This is so the rice cooks evenly throughout. The problem is you can’t use a paella pan on a flat stove, which is what we have. Another problem is that it’s only good for cooking, you guessed it, paella. Not wanting to spend $150 on a specialty pan, I asked the lady at the counter what my options were. She recommended the cazuela, which is more versatile. Sold.
Now here comes the ingredients, which is where paella gets tricky. The dish is a freelancer’s dream, because you can essentially use whatever meat or vegetable is available/in-season. Andres’ recipe called for green beans, chicken thighs, jamon serrano and wild mushrooms. We decided to amp it up with fresh eggplant as well. All of which was available, btw, at both the Queen Anne Farmers’ Market, and the nearby Metropolitan Market.
Before hitting the markets, I soaked the cazuela for six hours in water. Because the dish is kiln-fired at 2300 degrees at creation, it needs to soften a bit before you toss it on a hot stove. But it worked perfectly.
We made a few other slight alterations to the recipe. Andres uses homemade sofrito and chicken stock. Not wanting to waste several hours in the kitchen, I stuck with the store-bought varieties.
We added the ingredients, one after another, according to the recipe, but the real test came when we were to let it sit, bubbling, for the rice to absorb all the liquid. Jose (and my mother) warn not to touch the rice with a spoon or finger while it’s cooking, or the delicate crust will break and the rice will cook unevenly. So we obediently let it sit until all the liquid was soaked up and the paella was finished, a cake-like crust on both the top and slightly-burnt bottom.
Success. It was delicious.
Chicken and mushroom paella
(Inspired by Jose Andres)
Serves 4, or 2 or dinner with ample leftovers
- 2 Tb. olive oil
- 2 chicken legs or boneless thighs, cut into small pieces
- 1/2 pound fresh mushrooms
- 1-2 cups other vegetable (we used 1 medium eggplant, cut into 1 inch cubes)
- 3 oz. green beans, cut into 1-inch pieces
- 1 small garlic clove, pressed
- 2 slices chopped jamon serrano
- 1/4 cup dry white wine
- 1/4 cup sofrito
- 1 quart chicken stock
- 1 pinch saffron threads
- 1 bay leaf
- 1 Tb. salt
- 1 1/2 cups Spanish Bomba rice (or Calasparra or Arborio rice)
Heat the olive oil in a paella pan, cazuela, or 12-inch deep skillet over high heat. Add chicken and saute until browned on all sides. Set aside.
Add mushrooms and eggplant or other vegetable to the pan and saute until golden, about 3 minutes. Add green beans and garlic and cook 3 more minutes. Return chicken to pan, along with the ham.
Pour in the wine and cook about 1 minute. Add the sofrito and cook 3 minutes. Pour in the chicken broth and bring to a boil. Crush the saffron and add it and the bay leaf. Season with salt.
Now add the rice, and cook for 5 minutes over a high heat, stirring constantly with a wooden spoon.
Reduce the heat to low and cook at a slow boil at least 10 minutes, until all the liquid is absorbed. DO NOT poke or prod at the paella during this time, or the top crust won’t form properly.
Remove the paella from the heat and let sit 3 minutes. Then serve. Buen provecho.
I’ve noticed that recently, when I’m explaining events or news to people in conversation, I have the impulsive urge to hyperlink some of my words, rather than have to go off on a tangent to explain the reference. I think this is a sign that I spend too much time online…
Fortunately, we now have a blog, so I can just direct people here to explain the One Pot dinner we attended last week.
It’s hard to define exactly what One Pot is, but basically it’s a dinner served family style in a unique location with a discussion-worthy topic or person on-hand.
In this case, the visiting guest was Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham, discussing his book “Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human”, about how his research shows that cooking, more than tools or a genetic mutation or anything else, was the major factor in the evolution of modern man.
Dr. Wrangham, coincidentally, also happened to be my professor in a large lecture class on human evolution my freshman year at college. So we knew we had to check this out.
The dinner was held at Caffe Vita on Capitol Hill, in their coffee warehouse next door to the coffeeshop. In the entrance was a massive Neopolitan-style oven, full ablaze, with chefs unhurriedly pushing and pulling trays of food in and out of it. There were burlap bags of coffee piled around tables set up in a sunlight-filled warehouse. As attendees arrived bearing alcohol, we were all given copies of the book.
Michael Hebb, the “food provocateur” behind One Pot (just read the story, easier than explaining), introduced the evening, and after a brief Q&A with Dr. Wrangham, the food started circling. The casually dressed chefs making the meal, by the way, included Mark Fuller of West Seattle restaurant Spring Hill, which meant one of Food & Wine’s top new chefs was essentially cooking a private meal for about 50 people.
Need I mention how incredible the food was, and all from the wood-fired oven? There was Macrina bread with raw butter, a baby kale salad with lemon and goat cheese, Israeli coucous with ramps, sausages, lamb chops, and for dessert, Theo chocolates and lusciously smooth Caffe Vita coffee.
The communal table led to easy conversation with the other diners, and Dr. Wrangham did end up sitting at our table for part of the night, so I was able to confess I’d been in his lecture class all those years ago.
And of course, this all happened because I learned about the event through Twitter — this and the other One Pot and Words and Wine events held in Seattle. It’s definitely on our agenda to go to some future One Pot dinners, as well as the Words and Wine sessions with people like soon-to-be-former-NYT-restaurant-critic Frank Bruni.
Panko-crusted rockfish tacos with cumin black beans, slaw and avocado sauce — a reasonably local-sourced meal
We recently saw the film Food, Inc., at the Seattle International Film Festival. While we weren’t exactly expecting anything life-shattering, having read The Omnivore’s Dilemma and being obedient farmers’-market attendees, it still made an impression on us.
Namely, that while food in the U.S. has become incredibly industrialized and hyper-processed, the most basic thing you as a consumer can do to take a stance against it is to “opt-out” of that industrial system. It’s a familiar mantra: buy local and buy organic. And we already make an effort to read labels and avoid unpronounceable ingredients and high fructose corn syrup. But watching the movie inspired me to make more of a concerted effort to actually look at where our food is coming from.
Putting this into practice earlier this week at the vast and daunting Shoreline Central Market was another story. We’d go to grab some organic apples, wince at the $3 a pound price, then see they were shipped in from Chile. Isn’t this Washington State? Isn’t this where most of the apples in the country come from? The same thing happened with buying the fish for the fish tacos. I went to ask for my standby of tilapia, only to see it was farmed and from Ecuador. Foiled! Fortunately the fishmonger (great word, huh) recommended rockfish, which was wild and labeled as USA. (It ended up tasting better than tilapia, too.) Still, I guess we should feel fortunate that the store labeled origins at all, even if it was sometimes vague like “USA” or “Northwest”, which could mean anything.
I wonder, though, if we should give up on grocery stores all together and do more like we did living in Brooklyn, when we would often shop the old-fashioned way: one stop for bread, one for fish, one for vegetables. Each store does one thing and does it well, and gets their food from a source they personally know. It’s less convenient that way, but not necessarily more expensive: a hefty bunch of local asparagus at the Wallingford Farmers’ Market yesterday was $1.50, while at the Shoreline Market it was $3.99 a pound. But neither do we want to be the self-righteous windbags at a party proclaiming how we only eat food from our neighbors Joe the Farmer and Susie the Gardener.
What we’re trying to do is simply the livable option. Be aware of where our food comes from and whenever possible, make the effort to go for the local, organic, environmentally friendly option. But not kill ourselves over it.
Fish tacos with cumin black beans, slaw and avocado sauce
(Adapted from GQ, of all places, namely the slaw and sauce)
Feeds 2 people with leftovers for lunch the next day
For the slaw:
- 3 cups shredded green cabbage
- 1/3 cup chopped onion
- 2 limes
- 1/3 cup chopped cilantro
- 1/2 tsp. dried oregano
- salt and pepper to taste
Toss all ingredients together and taste for seasoning, then cover and chill. This gets better the longer it sits in the fridge.
For the sauce:
- 1/3 cup mayo
- 1/2 ripe avocado
- 1/2 cup cilantro leaves
- 1 or 2 limes, depending on preference
- 1/8 tsp. cayenne pepper
Blend all ingredients in a food processor. It may be on the thick side, depending on how much lime juice you used; thin with more lime juice or water. Taste for seasoning, and chill until the rest of dinner is ready.
For the beans:
Heat a couple tablespoons of olive oil in a medium saucepan. Crush in 2-3 cloves garlic and a couple dunks of cumin. When garlic is translucent, add 1 can black beans, partially drained (Goya is best) and bring to a bubble. Turn the heat down and let simmer at least 10 minutes or until everything else is ready.
For the fish:
- 3/4 to 1 lb. white fish filets, like rockfish or tilapia
- 1 egg
- Flour
- Panko!
- Olive oil
Heat a non-stick pan over medium heat. Add a tablespoon or so of olive oil. Meanwhile, set up one plate of flour, one bowl with the egg, beaten, and one plate of panko. Salt and pepper the filets, then dip both sides in flour, egg wash, and panko in order.
Put filets in hot pan and cook about 4 min per side or until fish flakes and is no longer translucent in the center. Flake into manageable pieces and serve with small corn tortillas, black beans on the side, and slaw and sauce on top. With a nice Mexican beer, natch.
Spinach is such a tease. You think you have a whole dinner’s worth, then you toss it in a pan and it dissolves into a paltry handful. I prefer ample amounts of spinach, because it tastes fresh and healthy and I feel like I’m getting my necessary vitamins. Plus, green makes food look nice.
Anyway, I have, to my mind BRILLIANTLY, solved the shrinking spinach conundrum. Yes, it’s still the same amount of spinach, but it’s all in the mind games. Intellectual gastronomy, if you will.
Also, I need to get a camera better than an iPhone. Though you can do cool things with the “Sharpen” tool.
Double-Spinach Pasta with Sausage
- 8 oz. pasta (1/2 pound) I used bow-tie but anything would work
- 8 oz. spinach (or whatever size bag you have)
- 2-3 pre-cooked sausages (I used some random Trader Joe’s brand but anything classier would only make this taste better. But it must have spice.)
- 1 Tb. olive oil
- grated parmesan cheese, about 1/2 cup or however much you like
Boil a medium-large pot of water.
While waiting for water to boil, heat the oil in a medium-to-large non-stick saute pan over medium heat. Slice the sausage widthwise on an angle, so the flat ends are ovals. When oil is hot, add the sausage and cook about 8 minutes, tossing a couple times so brown on all sides.
When sausage is browned, add half the spinach and cook until wilted. Turn heat to very low or turn off all together.
When water is boiling, add the pasta and cook until al dente. During the last minute of cooking, turn the heat back on under the spinach and sausage if it was off.
Drain the pasta and add it to the pan with the spinach and sausage. Toss around to coat.
Add the other half of the spinach and toss around so it is combined but isn’t wilting. You’ll have a mix of half dark-green spinach, half bright-green spinach.
Turn off the heat, top with parmesan and salt and pepper to taste.
Serves 2 with leftovers for 1 lunch.
Lisa
Jeremy
