Pasta

The other day I got a hankering for pea pasta. Yea, pea pasta. Weird, right? Maybe, but I stumbled upon this delicious recipe from Cookie and Kate and not only was it yummy, it was eye-opening! How? Well, I have always tried to make simple pasta dishes, like pasta with maybe roasted tomatoes and some grated cheese...or some other plain noodle with a veggie or two and getting the pasta not to stick has always been confounding!
I thought you had to rinse the pasta with cold water. Then I thought you had to drizzle some olive oil over the pasta. Nope. At least those two options never worked for me. The pasta always got gummy.

Alas, this recipe shared the secret - pasta water! I know, I think almost every pasta recipe says, "save X cups of pasta water" and I've always ignored it. Silly me. This time, I used it just as the recipe says and my pasta was perfect. Actually, I didn't use asparagus. Just frozen peas and I probably subbed some other nuts for the pine nuts since I didn't have any pine nuts. Delicious.

Pasta water.