Cooking on deadline
This is one of those super-fast pastas that you will be happy to add to your repertoire, especially now when many of us are getting swallowed up into backto-school schedules.
You’ll even have time to make a green salad while the water comes to a boil, and prep the rest of the ingredients while the pasta cooks. You can make a complete dinner in less than half an hour. Woohoo!
People often wonder how much to salt the cooking water for pasta. The answer is probably more than you’d think. Some chefs say the water should taste like the sea, which may be a bit extreme, but a solid tablespoon of salt in a large pot of water is not overdoing it. The point is that salting the water really can let the salt absorb into the pasta while it’s cooking, adding flavour in a way that adding salt later cannot. You will probably add more salt as you put together your dish and make your sauce, but this first salting step is hard to make too much of.
Then, for this particular recipe, you’ll want to be judicious with additional salt. Two reasons: You will be using some of the salted cooking water to make the sauce, and you will be adding cheese to the pasta. Parmesan can be a little salty, and feta as well, so as you toss the pasta with the cooking water, cheeses and other ingredients, taste as you go. Remind yourself of the golden rule of salt: You can add more later but you can’t take it out.
This pasta dish is vegetarian, but you could add some cooked shrimp or cubes of chicken (sauteed, poached, grilled, whatever you like). This would be a great way to use up a couple of leftover chicken breasts.
And while linguine is the suggested noodle here, any pasta shape would work. But every once in a while, it’s just plain fun to have a pasta that you can twirl — ask any kid.