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.

* begin rant/ Okay, so since so many of you guys are outraged by my South-African-wine-is-sulfuric comment, I will note that this was a 6 dollar bottle from TJs. I do understand that there are better wines out there, but you have to understand that I purchased this bottle because I liked the etiquette label, not for the quality. And I do find that South African wines tend to be sulfuric, if not mineral-y. Some people love that, but I don’t. So shut up and quit bugging me about it. /end rant

**In case you don’t know what a secretary bird is, it is an epic-looking bird of prey. It stomps its prey to death with stiletto like talons. I would love to have one of these in my front yard to chase away those pesky magazine sellers.

(image from Wikipedia)

Tagged as: meatless Mondays, pasta, recipes