Fall back to pasta

I like pasta and I am looking for ways to make it interesting, even if it’s a subtle tweak to a recipe. A while back, I wrote about one of the best pasta dishes I ever tasted. Now this might sound arrogant since I made it, but I really believe it. The dish was whole wheat spaghetti with bacon, leeks, beans and half-and-half. The salty bacon combined with the slight creamy sauce flavored with Parmesan was a delight. I haven’t tried that dish again, but when I visited my grandparents a few weeks ago, I experimented with another pasta dish without red sauce. While I still like marinara or tomato-based sauces (mom, yours is fantastic), I am beginning to like pasta with a light sauce using pasta cooking water.  So, with this in mind, I set out to make dinner with some penne, Delicata squash, leftover mushrooms and either powdered Romano or Parmesan.

I cut the squash into 1/2-inch cubes and roasted them with salt and pepper until tender. The mushrooms were sauteed in Smart Balance. Cook the pasta, reserve some of the cooking liquid, add the squash and mushrooms to the pasta with maybe a ladle-and-a-half of cooking liquid, cheese and a scant amount of whipping cream and you’re done.

The flavors all worked – slight sweet squash with earthy mushrooms and slightly-salted cheese. But the pasta wasn’t coated enough. Next time I would add more cooking liquid. This dish would gain a valuable boost from bacon. The squash makes it, though you could substitute other veggies, specifically leafy greens, for the mushrooms – Swiss chard and spinach come to mind.

On Thursday I made the blue cheese, walnut and escarole spaghetti recipe from Gourmet magazine. What a dish! And that’s a positive statement. This dish gets its spine from the blue cheese, which melts into a coating for pasta and wilted escarole. The escarole and pasta mix together and walnuts go atop.

For the cheese, I used Greven Broeker, a cow’s milk cheese from Belgium ($31.95 a pound), for the majority and a little bit of Roquefort, Mons, from France, a raw, sheep’s milk cheese sent from Bedford Cheese Shop. The roquefort has a stronger, hefty tang than the Greven Broeker. I bought the Greven Broeker in November at South End Formaggio in Boston. I opened the wrapping to find the cheese with a slimy coat. It had the color of a very pale beige. But I used it anyway and I’m still here two days later.