Fettuccine with Smashed Peas, Sausage & Ricotta Cheese

This is our first “tag team” blog entry. I had a massage at 5:00 Monday evening (ahhh!), so I prepped all of the ingredients for Ben to put this dish together, which he managed to do while wrangling a four year old and a three month old... no small feat!

To me, this is a perfect example of a recipe that looks amazing on paper and is ho-hum in reality. Nothing wrong with it, necessarily, except perhaps a lack of cohesion. Ben and I both had problems articulating what was wrong aside from the fact that the flavors never meshed.

We had to laugh, because before this blog project, we would have given this recipe a four or five. Now, our standards seem permanently elevated and a perfectly fine dinner gets an average rating. Kind of puts the pressure on for years to come, no? We’ve decided, also, that we need to standardize the rating system a bit, so look for that in a future post. Can’t live without a rubric! I guess once a teacher, always a teacher.

For the sauce, you sauté garlic and Italian sausage, then add peas and smash them with the back of your spoon or with a potato masher. One note: the recipe calls for hot Italian sausage, but I used Boulder Sausage’s mild Italian sausage in lieu of hot in the interest of Sophia’s and my palates. I’m not convinced that the added heat would have added much to improve the dish.

You then stir in ricotta cheese and chopped fresh basil and some Pecorino Romano and toss with the pasta and some pasta water. Easy enough, and certainly very flavorful. The smashed peas and basil give the pasta a rather lovely springy green color and flavor, and the sausage is yummy in its own right. But, somehow, none of it goes together. Our feeling is that it’s a good basic recipe, but that we might play around a bit with the meat and might add a bit of grated lemon zest to complement the peas and basil. 

Fine, but not too exciting. Of course, it had peas, sausage and basil, three of Sophia’s favorites, so she gave it five stars. We’re saying three. I think we’ll move on to some of Giada’s other offerings another time, but likely won’t return to this, at least as written.

Whole-Wheat Linguine with Green Beans, Ricotta & Lemon

As we shared this dish, Eryc, Ben, Sophia and I vigorously debated what rating to give it (my blog has become a family endeavor!) This is a tricky recipe to rate, because it was fundamentally good, but, at the same time, everyone had lots of ideas for improvement. Add crumbled bacon, crisped pancetta, toasted pine nuts, etc. Ultimately, the dish’s imperfections dropped it from a 4 to a 3. That said, it was simple and tasty, creamy without feeling at all heavy and made great use of crisp-tender fresh green beans and cherry tomatoes. 

My mom, Diana, brought me this cookbook, Giada’s Kitchen, this winter, and I love the simplicity of her recipes, her use of flavorful but easy-to-find ingredients, and, to be honest, the beautiful photographs of Giada. Truly, she’s spectacular!

Anyway... Sophia and I have been reading through this book, looking at pictures and talking about the things that are new to her, like yellow heirloom tomatoes and rasp graters (we have a weird household). I picked this because I like the idea of a creamy pasta without a lot of fat—it uses part-skim ricotta. Also, I have fallen in love with the texture of whole-wheat pasta, and have found that it holds up better as leftovers.

All in all, this was colorful, tasty and quick. I do think it needs the added dimension of pine nuts or pancetta, or perhaps a little warmth from red pepper flakes, and I might use a bit more green beans and tomatoes, since everyone here really loves their veggies.