This recipe from the Food Network Magazine didn’t plate well – but it was good. Also, I feel very old and boring admitting that I receive a print copy of the Food Network Magazine. I used to get Rolling Stone, Bazaar, and Vanity Fair . . . now I look forward to the latest Martha Stewart magazine. Sigh.
Ingredients:
- 3 tablespoons unsalted butter
- 1/3 cup panko
- Kosher salt and freshly ground pepper
- 1 bunch spinach, stemmed (6 to 8 ounces)
- 1 cup frozen peas, thawed
- 1 pound cheese ravioli
- 1 clove garlic, minced
- 1 teaspoon chopped fresh sage
- 1/2 cup heavy cream
- 1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese
Directions:
Heat 1 tablespoon butter in a large skillet over medium heat. Add the panko and cook, stirring often, until golden, about 4 minutes. Season with salt and pepper and remove to a small bowl; set aside. Wipe out the skillet.
Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Heat 1 tablespoon butter in the skillet over medium-high heat. Add the spinach and cook until wilted and tender, about 3 minutes. Transfer to a fine-mesh sieve and press out the excess liquid, then transfer to a cutting board and roughly chop. Combine the spinach and peas in a medium bowl. Wipe out the skillet.
Add the ravioli to the pot of boiling water and cook as the label directs. Reserve 1/2 cup cooking water, then drain. Heat the remaining 1 tablespoon butter, the garlic and sage in the skillet over medium heat. Cook until the garlic is just tender, 1 to 2 minutes. Add the heavy cream and 1/4 cup of the reserved cooking water; bring to a simmer. Stir in the cheese and cook until melted, about 1 minute. Add the spinach and peas and cook, stirring, until slightly thickened, about 3 minutes. Add the ravioli to the skillet and toss to coat. Add more cooking water as needed to loosen, 1 tablespoon at a time.
Divide the ravioli mixture among bowls. Top with the toasted panko.
Nutrition per Serving: 360 calories with 23g fat, 30g carbs, and 10g protein.
I would eat that even though I don’t know what a “panko” is.
It’s a kind of bread crumb, Japanese origin I think, but commonly found. A lot of recipes specifically call for them, like they do extra virgin olive oil or San Marzano tomatoes or…I just forgot my third example. In my experience, you would have to have the nose and palate of a bloodhound to tell the difference if you substituted something similar, but I smoked (cigarettes) for 30 years so I may not be the best judge.
I call it bougie breadcrumbs.
Mainly because lots of people would be unwilling to buy the same cannisters of Progresso, Good Value, etc breadcrumbs that our mothers and grandmothers always had in the pantry, but they’d definitely buy those fancy Panko Japanese breadcrumbs.
I have thoughts:
1. This comes hard on the heels of yesterday’s debate about whether you should add peas to pasta carbonara, so there is a theme here, which sadly I did not read ahead so my FYCE for tomorrow has nothing to do with adding peas to pasta.
2. I used to subscribe to so many magazines and newspapers. A lot of them I got for free through friends or through my formerly posh zip codes (both residential and my midtown office address.) I need to confess here that I subscribed to Rachael Ray’s magazine for three years up until about three years ago. I got two of the Martha Stewart ones, but that was through a friend. For a couple of years I subscribed to the Taste of Home magazine, but that was ridiculous because all the stuff is available online and it’s all user-generated content anyway, like FYCE. The straw that broke this camel’s back is when I got a hardbound Taste of Home book in the mail and actually read the 20 pieces of mail that came with it, and one of them said I would be getting a book every month to review for 30 days and if I wasn’t satisfied I could just return it, or keep it, for the list price, which was wildly overpriced. Three phone calls to Bangalore or wherever later, I finally got them to stop sending me the books and I canceled my magazine subscription while I was at it. Taste of Home is part of Reader’s Digest, so you would think they’d operate in a friendly, all-American, up-front-and-honest way, but I guess RD is now in the hands of some Vulture Capital firm or something.
Should you join me in my boudoir (it’s a little cozy, with Better Half and Faithful Hound, and none of us is small for his breed) you will see that on my nightstand, buried beneath books, is my Thanksgiving, 1993 copy of Gourmet Magazine. Why have I held onto it for 30 years and given it pride of place? Nostalgia, because Thanksgiving, 1993, is when we hosted our first Thanksgiving where I decided to enter our friendly Competitive Cooking Olympics and wowed my friends with four recipes from that issue. I miss Gourmet so much. And Ruth Reichl. I have a couple of her books.
FYCE has picked up a sponsorship from Green Giant.
HO HO HO (TM)
No. No no no no no. You must run, not walk, to your nearest Whole Foods, where the fruit and veg is often subpar and past its prime and way overpriced, but it is notionally “organic” and somehow feel-goodish, even if it is trucked in from a continent away, just like the unspeakably inferior offerings at the local D’Agostino’s, which itself is overhyped and overpriced, and so on down the line, until you get to the chain supermarkets where those people shop, where you wouldn’t be caught dead, unless of course you were going to give an “ethnic” New York Times recipe a whirl and thought one of those supermarkets might have exactly what you’d need for [fill in the blank.]
Don’t get me started on Trader “microwave some party snacks and that’s the best dinner EVER” Joe’s.