cutesy jingles

This meat­less Mon­day thing, I’m get­ting the hang of it.

Don doesn’t like the idea of meat­less Mon­days (Boys. They like meat). Even worse for him is that Tues­days end up being meat­less, or at least pescatar­ian, because we do Taco Tues­days at Rubio’s and eat noth­ing but fried fish tacos (Tues­days are also Teatime Tues­days, and I lay off on the cof­fee). Wednes­days, I don’t have any cutesy jin­gles for, so din­ner­time finally returns to the usual routine.

But! This Wednes­day ended up being meat­less too, because we were too drained from work­ing out in the AC-less exer­cise room that our apart­ment com­plex has. At times of post-workout blahs, a heavy meal doesn’t sound too great. Nor does com­plex cook­ing. There’s always that Del Taco, or the Carl’s Jr. down the street, but that would defeat the whole pur­pose of our sweaty, uncom­fort­able work­out.
So on days like this, I turn to an old recipe and tweak it a little.

This is a tweak on the lemon gar­lic gnoc­chi that I posted a long time ago. Now that I look back at it, it’s pretty much the same as the orig­i­nal Giada recipe that I ninja’d from. Well, almost. Mine’s a bit dif­fer­ent because I pan fried the gar­lic — I didn’t want to smell like a vam­pire killer after din­ner, so I nixed the raw chopped gar­lic. And I added some pine nuts because I felt bad for the guy and thought, hell, nuts have pro­tein in it, right? Right.

Every­thing is eye­balled because this is one of those lazy day recipes, but you get the gist of it. Here goes:

Lemon Gar­lic Spaghetti — serves 2

4 oz dry spaghetti
1/4 cup grated parme­san
2 tsp olive oil
1 clove gar­lic
1/2 lemon
2 tbsp pine nuts
5–6 basil leaves, chiffonaded

First, start your gar­lic oil. Pour in olive oil and chopped up gar­lic into a small fry­ing pan and let it cook over low, until the gar­lic starts to brown on edges. Imme­di­ately remove from heat and reserve.
While that’s start­ing up, boil up some spaghetti.

Chif­fon­ade some basil leaves. Here I have pathet­i­cally limpy basil leaves, but fresh is, as usual, the best.

Then you take some cheese…

Some pine nuts…

And dump it into a large bowl, with the gar­lic oil, gar­lic chunks and all. Squeeze in lemon juice. Throw in the spaghetti and toss until well com­bined. Plate, crack some black pep­per on it, and nom.

We paired it with some South African wine, which are always sul­fu­ric and headache induc­ing (at least to me). But I couldn’t resist pick­ing up the damn bot­tle at Trader Joes, because the label fea­tures a SECRETARY BIRD for chris­sakes. That tick­les my fancy.

(image from Wikipedia)
In case you don’t know what a sec­re­tary bird is, it is an epic-looking bird of prey. I would love to have one of these in my front yard to chase away those pesky mag­a­zine sellers.

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Tagged as: meatless Mondays, pasta, recipes