A pasta with green vegetables and a white instead of a red pasta sauce! I suddenly had a craving for asparagus, which is why I bought some at the Farmer’s Market when I thought that 1.99/lb isn’t too bad, for American standards at least. I had lemons at home and absolutely wanted to make a lemon sauce, so here we are: Lemon Asparagus Pasta.

It tastes just as great as it looks on the picture!

I was inspired by this recipe on Epicurious (yet again, of course) but since I didn’t have any heavy cream, I made a sauce with olive oil and parmesan (how unhealthy huh). In the future, I will keep in mind to finish the sauce before I toss in the noodles and the vegetables… because ultimately the sauce turned out somewhat not smooth - this is how it always is, or so I heard, but I am sure you can do better. Next time I will!

I love my French cookbooks (of which only one is really French, the quite generic but lovely “Je sais cuisiner”). “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” doesn’t really cover all the recipes I want - especially in the vegetable section. Most of those vegetables are very simple, typically to accompany a dramatic main dish, whereas I very, very rarely make main dishes. Today is something like an exception, I would consider a shepherd’s pie a full meal, perfect to be accompanied by vegetables.

“Je sais cuisiner”, on the other hand, is a wonderful collection of a huge amount of recipes - but all the recipes are amazingly short. This means that you don’t actually learn much about cooking or techniques itself, the book more or less assumes that you know how to do that. I mainly use the book for inspiration of what dishes to make, and to give myself an overview on the repertoire of typical French cooking; in this matter, “Je sais cuisiner” is much greater than the haute-cuisine-ish “Mastering the Art of French Cooking”.

According to “Je sais cuisiner”, hachis parmentier is a layer of ground meat sandwiched in between two layers of mashed potatoes.

Furthermore, “Je sais cuisiner” is much more down to earth, full of advices for kitchen organisation, health or wine choices. It’s a little bit like those German housewife books. I especially found it very interesting to see what amount of food they recommend for one single meal:

• 100g of salad or soup
• 100-150g of meat or 1-2 eggs or 150g fish
• 200-300g of vegetables or 70g of pâtes or 70g of rice
• 250g of potatoes
• 100g-150g of fruits
• 30-50g of cheese
• 80-100g of bread

This feels amazingly wrong if you ask me. I mean… this is like a whole kilogram of food!

“Ceux qui savent manger sont comparativement de dix ans plus jeunes que ceux à qui cette science est étrangère.”

While looking up recipes on the internet, I went for something like a mix of the Easy Shepherd’s Pie, this hachis parmentier recipe and the one in “Je sais cuisiner”. (Julia Child would never make hachis parmentier, mind you.) So the end result pretty much is this: The mashed potatoes have browned onions and garlic in them; the ground beef was mixed with Italian style bread crumbs, an egg, browned onions, finely cut carrots and white wine, and then sautéed with parsley, thyme and bay leaves. By the way, I am so glad I went out of the way to Trader Joe’s to get the white wine, it’s doing marvels for the taste of the meat.

Today, the side vegetable I chose happened to be bok choy, because I know I need to eat them soon. Plus I didn’t feel like making anything more elaborate, and there are vegetables in the hachis parmentier itself too, after all. Even though the result looks great, there were actually pieces of potatoes that were not thoroughly cooked and I had to pick them out. That means I cannot even offer this to other people, sadly. But, at least I have a lovely lunch tomorrow.

I love ratatouille to death. In fact, whenever I am at the cafeteria and they serve ratatouille, I would take it. It happened once that they did something utterly wrong with it, but usually ratatouille is the best at the canteen. It costs 40 cents or something so that the whole meal with rice would come to a total of 80 cents. It would be vegetarian, but delicious and healthy at the same time! I was sure it would be even more delicious and healthier when you make it yourself.

Does this look like something I spent 2 hours on?

Now, it was time to make it myself. I meticulously followed the recipe of Just Hungry but I honestly regret having done so. The problem is that I wasn’t quite good at getting rid of the liquid. It’s one of the things I suck at doing, because most of the dishes I have made up until today were all about keeping the liquid, and the simply thought of wringing out the liquid of vegetables into kitchen paper makes me feel wasteful. Ultimately, the ratatouille came out much more delicious than I imagined, but spending two hours on it is a little exaggerated for a dish that was supposed to be simple in my opinion. I do agree that the tastes of the vegetables in ratatouille should not mix too much prior serving, but I don’t quite see the point in baking everything for such a long time. If I happen to make it again, I would sautée everything, make a sauce and then put everything together. That’s it. :3

Finally, ratatouille reminds me of another thing I absolutely wanted to make this summer: gazpacho. It’s too bad we don’t own any of those mixer things that you can use to make vegetables into juice…