Lemon Pasta

Difficulty Rating:

I'm putting this down as a 1 Cookie recipe because it's painfully simple and you probably have everything except the lemons already. There is a bit of a variation on the recipe if you wanna get fancy, but I'll explain that later.

Recipe:

1 lb pasta
2/3 cup grated Parmesan cheese
2/3 cup olive oil (extra-virgin preferred)
1/2 cup fresh lemon juice, about 4 lemons
salt and pepper

Boil the pasta and drain.

Mix remaining ingredients. Pour over pasta. Mix until the pasta is well covered. Serve hot or cold.

Execution:

The thing I love about this recipe is its versatility. This is the most basic version of this recipe, but I will often add other things to it: grilled chicken, sauteed broccoli, fresh diced tomatoes, anything really. It's also delicious both hot and cold, so it's perfect right off the stove or refrigerated and brought to a picnic. Yum!

Ingredients:

No, this is not an ad for Ronzoni, they were just having a sale at Trade Fair. Shut up.

As far as which kind of pasta to use, it really doesn't matter. I've made it with spaghetti, angel hair, rotini, small shells, linguine... really, whatever you like. I find that using something with texture or nooks-slash-crannies (rotini, bow ties, shells, spaghetti rigata) works best because then there's places for the delicious cheesy-lemon sauce to get stuck in.

First step: boil the pasta.

Boil, kitchen Buddha, boil! Use your magic zen kitty dragon rainbow chakra power ding!

Next, juice the lemons. A note on making things easy: I don't have any fancy juicer, I just use a fork and my ten little fin'ers. If you have a juicer that's fine, go crazy. But if not, and you just want to juice them by hand, start by rolling the lemons on the counter.

Just roll them from fingertips to palm, squishing the lemon, and that'll break up some of the pulp and make it easier to get the nummy juice out. Cut 'em in half, then strain the seeds. I usually do this by sticking the collander on top of the measuring cup and juicing it there...

... but you can always just juice 'em into a bowl and pick the seeds out by hand. I do that when I'm feeling too lazy to wash the collander.

Now that you've got your juice, dump the oil and cheese into it. I'm using the basic powdered cheese we all know and love, which will henceforth be known as Shakey Cheese. If you can afford it, go ahead and get a chunk of parmesan and grate it yourself - it's a hundred times better. Not that this isn't delicious, but real parmesan is like a party in your freaking mouth.

Anyway, mix 'em all up. It'll probably still separate a little (for all you scientists out there, this is a suspention mixture) but that's fine, just mix it up again before you pour it. You can add salt and pepper to this mixture or put it on the pasta after you've mixed it all together, it's up to you.

You should be able to do all this and have a beer before the pasta's done boiling. Once it's done, drain it and put it in a big ol' bowl. Then just pour your cheesey-lemon sauce over it.

Just dump it all in, you don't have to do anything special. Then mix it all up so the pasta gets completely coated, and sha-zam! Delicious lemon pasta!

The original recipe for this says that at this point you should add 1/3 cup fresh chopped basil. This is an AWESOME idea and I love doing it. Basil is my favorite fresh herb to use, and it makes it super colorful (because, let's face it, this is kinda monotone, yes?). I just forgot to get basil at the store, so none for me. Also, fresh basil kinda makes this a 2 Cookie Recipe. Anyway, I recommend that if you have access to basil, you throw it in there. You can also try sauted spinach, that's good. I mean, anything that's light and tastes good with lemon and cheese. Experiment, dump it in there, see what happens!

I myself am a lover of cheese, so I always put a bunch of extra cheese in mine.

You can believe, dear reader, that I ate the crap out of that. Mmmmm.