cooking with infused oils

When I first make something I really love, I often crave that particular meal until I've had a chance to recreate it. That means I'm usually dusting off a new recipe before the ink starts drying. Silly? Probably. But my need to recreate has a plus side.

Tonight I decided to try my hand at a summer pasta dish Sarah and I crafted over the weekend. I use this language intentionally — we were both at the store throwing summer veggies into our basket, and together we decided how to toss everything together. The actual preparation, however? All Sarah. I was busy mixing up some white sangria.

Originally I was going to write about the dish in terms of the vegetables used — a bright medley complete with summer squash and nutrient-adding spinach — but to do so would have been to neglect the key ingredient: infused olive oil.



These are the three bottles of oil — lemon, basil and rosemary — that stay within easy reach on the top of my stove (their lowly cousin, Kroger brand extra virgin, is never far away either). I got them each for about $6 on sale at Target. There are some cooks who will tell you $25 for a bottle of extra virgin olive oil is not unreasonable. Not me. I’m more a “to hell with Italy, I have to make rent this month” kind of cook. I’ve gotten good results with all of these, though I imagine $6 is about the threshold. A cheaper bottle of lemon-flavored oil (an important distinction, I’m sure) did not yield pleasing results.

Of course, there’s a moral to this story, and it’s that these three bottles are at home in Columbia and I’m still biding my time in Springfield.

This is the basic recipe, though most of the quantities are approximate. The dish is relatively simple to make but can dirty up a number of pots and pans.

summer veg pasta with lemon and parmesan

2 c penne or ziti pasta (we used Tinkyada brown rice penne)
1 small yellow squash, cut
1 small zucchini, cut
1 medium red pepper, diced
1 c fresh spinach, stems removed
1/3 c onion, diced
1/2 c mushrooms, cut
1/2 c broccoli
lemon-infused olive oil
parsley
oregano
grated parmesan
salt and pepper to taste

serves 2-3

Sarah boiled the pasta, steaming the zucchini, squash and broccoli in a steamer pan. Then, she sautéed the mushrooms and onion, adding red pepper to the pan as the other veggies finished steaming. She cooked down the spinach, tossing everything together in the lemon olive oil with a bit of parsley and oregano. A sprinkling of parmesan and a touch of salt and pepper was all it took to bring all these flavors together.



I didn’t have any lemon-infused olive oil on hand when I decided to try my hand at recreating this dish, but I did have a decent extra virgin and a lemon. I substituted some linguine noodles I was trying to use up for the penne, and Sarah has my steamer pan, so I just threw the diced broccoli, yellow squash and zucchini into a Zip ‘n Steam bag and nuked for two and a half minutes. I squeezed the lemon over the sautéing veggies just before tossing with the pasta (I somehow forgot to add spinach).

The result? Not bad. I definitely preferred the freshly grated parmesan I topped my pasta with to the stuff we shook out of the green can, but the overall effect wasn’t as pleasing. One of the reasons why the dish worked so well the first time was because all the flavors blended. Part of that was simply a matter of getting a mouthful of pasta and veg on the same fork. It just wasn’t as easy with my fat linguine noodles. The Zip ‘n Steam bag, on the other hand, was a shortcut I would definitely use again.

But even with a real lemon, I couldn’t duplicate the flavor combination of the infused olive oil. There’s something to be said about cooking flavor directly into the food you’re making.