Weeknight Pasta - Quick and Truly Different

Like everyone else, sometimes life intervenes so that rather than spend an hour prepping food, we just need to get dinner on the table (even if lately that table has been on the porch or deck). This recipe satisfies the need for efficiency without sacrificing my ever-present desire for food that is good and good for us. I also love it because it is so unlike anything else we make. Please note this comes almost verbatim from the February 2010 issue of Southern Living- "a reader recipe" no less. It's not plagiarism if you cite your source, right? I did make some subtle changes, but the core idea is "xeroxed".

The "mise-en-place" here requires 3 cloves of garlic minced, 2 bunches of basil roughly chopped, 1/4 cup toasted pine nuts and 4 ounces of crumbled Feta Cheese. (Toasting pine nuts is way easy: put them in a saute pan over medium heat - without oil - until they brown). You'll also need a seven ounce jar of "sun-dried" tomatoes, packed in olive oil. Reserve 2 Tbs of the olive oil from the tomatoes and slice the tomatoes into thin strips (but don't dice them - chunky is great).

To avoid stress, I don't start cooking my pasta (in this case wheat linguine, about half a package or 8 ounces) until everything I need is prepped and ready, but if you are cooler than me, feel free to chop while it boils. Do salt the heck out of the pasta water (to make it boil faster and to add flavor) and squirt some olive oil in the water too (to keep your pasta from sticking - perhaps the remaining oil from the tomatoes?).

The eleven minutes the pasta needs to cook provides 8 minutes of time to clean up (no kidding - this comes together FAST). Dump the basil, cheese and pine nuts into a large bowl. Then with about three minutes to go on the pasta, drop the garlic into a saute pan with the 2 tbs of olive oil saved from the tomatoes and cook it until it softens and smells great (but not until it browns). Then stir in the chopped sun-dried tomatoes just to heat them through (30 seconds). Drain the pasta then add it and the tomatoes and garlic to the bowl of nuts, cheese and basil and stir.

Maybe this takes 25 minutes the first time you make it, besting even Rachel Ray without being so annoyingly chipper. However, if you do it twice, I am guessing an average cook can do this in less than 20 minutes. We like it so much I expect I will be able to do it in 15 by the end of the summer. I understand whatever you don't scarf down heats up well the next day for lunch.