Dinner Tonight: Pasta with Brown Butter, Capers, Walnuts and Spinach
Posted by Blake Royer, May 25, 2010 at 5:00 PM
[Photograph: Blake Royer]
Doesn't it always come back to pasta? Dinner can take many forms and draw from many cuisines, and I love being challenged as a cook and learning new things. Yet sometimes all I want is what I know will be delicious. Something I know I can cook well, that I've loved all my life. For me, that's pasta. Always will be.
This particular recipe is adapted from a recent issue of Esquire magazine, from chef Joey Campanaro of The Little Owl in New York City. They asked him to come up with a trio of pasta dishes with a short shopping list—the other two are a tomato-bacon sauce and one with white anchovies with peppers. I was drawn to this recipe with nutty brown butter and the “tangy punch” of capers. Quick-wilted baby spinach gives it an earthy flavor, and a handful of walnuts are the crunch, while Parmesan brings it all back home. A simple dish, but one with an unexpected depth of flavor and a cooking time as long as it takes the pasta to finish.
Pasta with Brown Butter, Capers, Walnuts and Spinach
- serves 4 -
Adapted from Esquire.
Ingredients
1 pound bucatini, spaghetti, or other long pasta
1/4 pound butter
Juice of 1 lemon
1 tablespoon capers
1/2 cup chopped walnuts
5 ounces washed baby spinach
4 torn sage leaves
1/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese
Salt and black pepper to taste
Procedure
1. Bring a large pot of salty water to boil and cook the pasta until al dente.
2. Meanwhile, in a small pot or large skillet, melt the butter over medium heat. Once it foams, watch it carefully, stirring often, as the milk solids begin to brown and the butter becomes fragrant and nutty. Scrape along the bottom to prevent the solids from sticking and burning. When the butter is rich and brown, add the lemon juice to halt the cooking, then lower the heat. Add the capers and walnuts and cook for a minute longer.
3. Turn off the heat on the butter and add the spinach and sage leaves, tossing to wilt. Add the cooked pasta along with most of the Parmesan and toss. Taste for seasoning and finish with black pepper and the remaining cheese.
About the author: Blake Royer founded The Paupered Chef with Nick Kindelsperger, where he writes about food and occasional travels. After a year in Estonia, he's now living in Chicago.
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Courtesy of Universal Studios
Before the park’s grand opening, Harry Potter expert Melissa Anelli was magically granted access into Universal’s Wizarding World of Harry Potter for a “chill-inducing” walk through the gates of Hogwarts and a taste of some genuine “butterbeer.”
I will never get over the bizarre feeling of strolling through a snowy British town in air so hot and so humid I could boil pasta in the palm of my hand. Nor will it ever feel natural to gaze upon Hogwarts, flanked by its iconic boars—and the palm trees that surround it—from afar. But (sorry, mayor of London), there really isn’t a better place than Florida for the wedge of Harry Potter paradise that is Universal Studios’ Wizarding World of Harry Potter. After a few minutes, the superb detailing of the attraction fully distracts from the environmental ironies.
Months ago, I attended a press preview of the theme park on behalf of my website, The Leaky Cauldron. During that preview we were given a quick tour of the still-under-construction park and offered samples of food from its Three Broomsticks restaurant. After all the deliciousness that ensued, I started joking that we fans were going to enter the park, which officially opens this week, as our normal selves, but walk out fat and poor.
Fast-forward to Memorial Day weekend, when all three hosts of The Leaky Cauldron’s PotterCast—John Noe, Frank Franco, and I—gained entrance to the park during its soft opening period. We get a lot of tips in our inboxes, and quite a few of them indicated a soft open around the end of May. Nothing was certain, but we knew there would be a theme park “experience” for people who had bought a certain vacation package, so we figured, why not just spend Memorial Day in Orlando… just in case? The gamble paid off. It turned out that a guest at one of the Universal Resort hotels could get into the park an hour before it opened to everyone else—and that was how we got into the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. It closed after a few hours, but we spent those hours making the most of everything and my wisecracking prediction came true inside two hours. Three butterbeers, five souvenir pins, a Hog's Head Ale, a pumpkin juice, a Cauldron Cake, a set of wax seals, a Hogwarts shirt, and an annual pass later, my stomach had grown as my bank balance diminished—and I can honestly say it was the happiest I've ever been under such conditions.
At 7:30 a.m. sharp on May 29, we stood on line with roughly 400 other people, awaiting entrance to the Promised Land. Every last person there was part of the largest human train I’ve ever seen, speed-walking like ducks all the way to the back of Universal Studios' Islands of Adventure theme park to get into Hogsmeade. We squealed like children as the arch, with its wrought-iron sign that reads “Please respect spell limits,” drew near, and almost ran to get right into Hogwarts and onto the Forbidden Journey ride, the park’s signature attraction.
Sadly, we never got on: As we were reminded, the soft opening was like the technical rehearsal for a show. We instead spent 20 minutes wandering around the magnificently built Hogwarts, ogling the so-real-looking moving portraits and trying to restrain ourselves from hopping into a seat next to the Gryffindor common room fire, before the queue came to a standstill and a mild-voiced announcer evacuated us.
Who cared? We had all of Hogsmeade to explore—a life-size recreation of the world I’ve immersed myself in for nearly a decade. We moved on to Ollivanders, the wand shop from the franchise, where a wand master carefully selected two young children from our group and performed tests on them to determine their wands. Of course, in true theme park tradition, this meant they would have to buy them in the neighboring shop.
Casey Chan