Pasta, vegetables and overcoming deal breakers

A mix of vegetables takes center stage in this Pasta with Chickpeas, Fava Beans, Pecans and Spring Peas, with bacon playing a supporting role. Recipe and variations—including vegetarian and vegan versions—below.

Sundays are often when I cook whatever I’m posting the following Wednesday. But this past Sunday found me spending more than an hour at the Crafty Beaver hardware store, puzzling out what I needed to solve a minor plumbing problem and build a small bookcase. [Don’t be overly impressed—the bookcase is going to be, shall we say, elegantly simple.] Then I spent a good chunk of the afternoon solving said plumbing problem and starting on said bookcase. When it became clear I wasn’t going to get around to cooking, Marion offered to make this wonderful dish, solving both dinner and what to post. All I had to do was not start devouring my meal before I photographed it. I’ll let Marion tell you how this excellent pasta came together.

The other day the New York Times ran an article by Kim Severson in which good cooks were asked about their recipe deal breakers, “those ingredients or instructions that make them throw down the whisk and walk away.”

Experienced, talented cooks cited abstruse ingredients [48 freshly picked grape leaves, vast quantities of fresh animal blood], fussy or intimidating instructions [the recipes of Thomas Keller were particularly noted], recipes with several recipes within them, recipes that demand dangerous conditions, extreme equipment [a couscousière, cornet molds—and I say that as, um, the owner of cornet molds, and of a heavy copper tin-lined tarte Tatin pan, hauled home from Paris, that has become a place to keep our bananas]. My favorite example was the author’s own: She will not make any dish that requires an assistant. That made me laugh out loud.

Like every person reading the article, I immediately started putting together a similar list in my head. What magic words stop me from trying a recipe? Here are a few:

• 3 sticks butter
• 1 cup lard
• The phrase “on the third day”
• Any amount of insects [I will cheerfully eat pretty nearly any organ meat, but cannot make myself even consider eating an ant, a grub or a cicada]
• Dried bean curd sheets [I shy off thanks to a series of ridiculous kitchen disasters years back that pretty much became one of those little private running jokes, in this case between me and a never-conquered recipe called Tinkling Bells]
• “Have your butcher bone the pig, leaving the head intact” [that recipe, by the way, also includes the phrase “re-form the pig in its original shape,” which sounds so wistful somehow]

I have been cooking certain cuisines for years, but a long time ago I recognized that no matter how far I reach, there is always going to be an unbridgeable gulf between me and the most genuine examples of these foods. I have already said I am not going to eat anything with insects in it. I am not going to eat anything that in the US is construed as a pet. I am not going to eat any endangered mammals, and certainly not their paws.

Also, I am not going to cook anything out of a book the size and weight of a table, no matter how elegant the illustrations.

Years ago, I was standing in our back yard and reading some Martha Stewart magazine and came across a recipe for a ham baked on new-mown grass. There was a great deal of information about the grass you should choose to mow, how to make sure it is pristine, how to cut it… All I remember is opening my fingers and letting the magazine fall out of my hands and walking away from the magazine, which I believe eventually blew out of our yard or perhaps even decayed there, I don’t care, whatever, and I never read any other Martha Stewart publication again until a couple of weeks ago, when my sister [who for a couple of years had been saying, “It’s not what you remember!”] snuck a copy of Martha Stewart Living into a pile she was passing on to me. Okay, so I read it, fine, and once I navigated past the annoying crafts and the too many pastels I came across a pasta dish that, of course, sounded good, so good we had to mess with. Meaning that, for today at least, one of my ancient deal breakers has been overcome.

This descendant of Martha’s recipe asks you to cook the pasta in a moderate amount of water until the water is all absorbed and concentrated and cooked away leaving just pasta. I am usually nervous about this approach, not least because it means standing over the stove for seven or eight minutes and stirring pretty often, rather than wandering off to pick up the newspaper or look out the window at a puzzling brown bird. But I really like the technique here. It endows the pasta with a depth that is needed in a dish this spare.

This recipe begins with a lot of pasta—one pound uncooked—so it will serve five to six people easily. The next day Terry was able to celebrate Take Your Wife’s Cooking to Work Day.

You can make this recipe for a vegetarian if you use a vegetable broth and omit the bacon, and for a vegan if you also leave off the Parmesan.

Pasta with Chickpeas, Fava Beans, Pecans and Spring Peas
Serves 4 generously

1 tablespoon olive oil
2 cloves garlic, chopped
7 cups low-sodium vegetable stock or chicken stock or beef stock [see Kitchen Notes]
1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes [see Kitchen Notes]
1 pound capellini
1 can mixed chickpeas and fava beans [or, alternatively, 1 can chickpeas], drained and rinsed well
1/2 cup freshly shelled green peas, from about 1 pound of unshelled peas [see Kitchen Notes]
1/2 cup toasted, coarsely chopped pecans
1/3 pound bacon, cooked and coarsely chopped
3/4 cup Parmesan, freshly grated, plus a little extra for garnish

In a large heavy saucepan [one sufficient to hold the 7 cups of liquid], sauté the bacon, then set it aside on paper towels. After it is drained, break it into chunks. Pour the fat out of the saucepan and discard it

Pour the olive oil into the saucepan. Add the garlic and cook for about 30 seconds. Then add the red pepper and the broth. Bring the broth to a boil and add the pasta all at once. Start stirring to make sure the water embraces every part of the pasta. Reduce the heat to a simmer. Toss in a few bacon pieces and keep stirring.

Cook, stirring often, until the stock is pretty much entirely absorbed. It will take about six minutes or so to reach al dente.

Add the chickpeas and favas, the rest of the bacon, half of the toasted pecans, the Parmesan and the fresh peas. [Yes, you are leaving the peas uncooked, just warming them.] Toss carefully so you don’t break up the pasta.

Dish the pasta onto individual plates. Garnish with the rest of the pecans and with a grating of extra cheese.

Kitchen Notes

Easy on the sodium. Whatever kind of stock you use, be sure it is low in sodium or even sodium free. This stock concentrates intensely in the cooking and will deliver a ferocious wallop of salt if you aren’t careful. You can always add salt, but you can’t get rid of it.

Peas, fresh or [in a pinch] frozen. When you are choosing fresh peas in their shells, select pods that feel very full but with shells that feel soft and tender, not dry and scarred and brittle. You can substitute frozen peas—in that case, add them when there is still a bit of liquid left to the pasta, and cook along with the pasta for a minute or two.

Variations on a theme. Bacon was very nice indeed in this. I’d like to try this dish again, but with bits of quickly cooked lamb and a lot more fresh peas. In that case, I would probably use a beef stock. I think this would also be nice with straight chickpeas, sautéed breast of chicken and a soft goat cheese rather than Parmesan—but then, I suppose it would be a different dish altogether.

Also this week in Blue Kitchen, 6/18/2008

Small Bites: Heart health, safe tomatoes and a broth shortcut. Staying young at heart with red wine, an update on the tomato salmonella scare and a favorite kitchen time saver, at WTF? Random food for thought.

Monk and Coltrane, lost and found. Revisiting a seminal jazz album released almost 50 years after it was recorded, at What’s on the kitchen boombox?