Herbed roasted chicken with beet-feta-orzo salad and green beens.

I should consider calling this “dinner on Sunday” instead of “dinner tonight.” My new schedule has been keeping me so busy that I really don’t have time to cook until the weekend and on Saturdays, I’m usually more concerned with catching up on the other things I’ve missed doing during the week. Like reading.

But, at the sacrifice of precious time I could be spending with my head in a book (only twenty pages left!), I decided to make dinner tonight. The roasted chicken from last week was so good that I wanted something similar again. I stuffed some minced herbs under the skin in the morning: fresh sage, thyme, oregano and garlic. The kitchen smelled incredible afterwards. I just realized that I forgot to pop the lemon I bought in the cavity before I roasted it. C’est la vie.

The beet salad was really the “star” of the meal though. I saw this recipe a few weeks back and made a mental note to myself. It sounded like a good combination. So tonight I went about making it based on what I remembered. I roasted the beets. I used shallots. Skipped the pine nuts completely. Seasoned to taste and I tasted a lot along the way because this salad is hard to put down. I was tempted to skip the chicken and just eat this instead.

Lemon-thyme rubbed pork chop with spinach-walnut pesto. Very adjusted version of “Mustard-Roasted Potatoes” from Smitten Kitchen. Brussels sprouts with pancetta.

Penne with sautéed zucchini. Eaten with grated Piave vecchio.

Dinner tonight came together in the same amount of time it took to boil water for and cook a half-pound of penne. The zucchini was sautéed with a few garlic cloves and seasoned with fresh thyme and crushed red pepper flakes. The tomato element comes from tomato paste. Once the cooked pasta and zucchini were combined, I added a splash of high-quality extra virgin olive oil.

Sautéed mushrooms, roasted broccoli and steak.

The mushrooms were honestly the best part of dinner tonight. I sautéed them with a few small cloves of garlic, some salt and pepper and a little water when the pan got too dry. As they were close to being done, I added some fresh thyme and right at the end, I threw in a half-tablespoon of butter. The broccoli was pretty good, it retained a nice bite and a deep flavor; and the steak was a nice piece of organic rib-eye; but those mushrooms really hit the spot.

Roasted heirloom tomatoes with garlic and thyme. Eaten with rotini and grated Piave vecchio.

I accidentally loaded this up with garlic — five cloves. Big ones. (Note to self: pay attention while you cook.) While it was roasting, I sniffed the air and thought, “That might have been too much.” But it all worked out in the end. The garlic mellowed out nicely, the tomatoes got saucy and everything worked itself into the corkscrew shape of the pasta. Although it doesn’t look like much (and isn’t very balanced), dinner tonight was good.

Rotini with broccoli rabe and caramelized shallots. Eaten with grated Piave vecchio.

My enthusiasm for Pasta With Stuff has not waned. Perhaps I’m making up for lost time: over a year of eating almost-exclusively within one or two cuisines can do that to a girl. Variety being the melange of life or something like that. And you know, she who controls the spice…

Caramelizing the shallots (two large ones) took the longest time but it gave the dish a nice, slightly deeper flavor. Once they were done, the rest took as long as it takes to cook the pasta. I added some red pepper flakes to the broccoli rabe while I was sautéing it and once the pasta was mixed in with the vegetables, I added the juice of half a lemon. The flavors worked for me, plus I had a lemon (sans zest) that needed to be used.

I used about two-thirds of a bunch of broccoli rabe for a half-box of rotini. I would have preferred a higher ratio of rabe to rotini, so I would suggest using a whole bunch. Adding some Italian sausage to this would also be excellent but I might skip the lemon in that case. It was also very satisfying as a vegetarian dish.

“Mezze Penne Niçoise” from French Revolution Blog. Eaten with grated Piave vecchio.

I used a whole smallish zucchini and basil instead of mint. This was a really simple dish to make but very effective. It’s also the type of recipe that lends itself well to variation. For me, the most valuable piece of information this recipe provided was the ratio of tomato paste to pasta. If you, like me, rarely eat or cook dishes this like, that type of instruction is very useful.

Oddly, the photograph doesn’t look very tomatoey but it actually was.