Spaghetti with Pesto, Green Garlic, and Endive

 

 

I’ve never really appreciated chicory greens.  Greens in the chicory family are pretty bitter and include curly endive, also called frisee, escarole, and radicchio.  I like the idea of curly endive and pick up a bunch from the store here and there thinking it will make a nice addition to salads, but then it languishes in the refrigerator.  In my opinion, they really best work with salads that have blue cheese and candied nuts – flavors that mask the bitterness of the green rather than highlight it.  So, I did a bit of looking around to find recipes to use the curly endive we just got in our share that would be a bit more inspiring than tossing it into a salad with enough other stuff to disguise it.  In my research (googling), I found that chicory greens are very commonly used in Italian cooking and found quite a few pasta recipes incorporating the green – and this recipe was born!  I used up the curly endive, some green garlic also from this share, and some frozen pesto from one of the many batches I made from one of last year’s shares.  I can’t believe we are STILL working our way through our masses of pesto, but it’s been nice to not have had to buy any during the winter – and each batch is slightly different depending on what greens I made it with throughout the course of the summer.

 

Green garlic is a great springtime treat.  It looks like scallions and tastes like a milder version of my beloved dried garlic.  Once the roots are off, the entire thing is edible, just chop it up and use wherever you use garlic.  I use lots since it’s pretty mild.

When sliced you can see the beginnings of the little baby garlic cloves inside.  After chopping the green garlic I sautéed in a bit of oil then added in a chunk of my frozen pesto, stirring until broken up.

While the green garlic and pesto were on, I thoroughly washed and then chopped the curly endive to add to the pan to wilt and join the pesto pasta sauce.

I used regular spaghetti for this recipe, it really would work with any time of pasta – try whole wheat, penne, whatever you have!  While the pasta is on to cook, make the pesto pasta sauce.

Pesto Pasta Sauce:

• Chopped Green Garlic
• Chopped Curly Endive
• Pesto
• Olive Oil
• Squeeze of Lemon

Sautee the chopped green garlic for a minute or two in a splash of olive oil.  Then, add in the pesto, sautéing for a minute more (and in this case, until thawed).  Add the chopped endive to the pan with a squeeze of lemon and stir to slightly wilt the greens.  At this point, the sauce can be removed from the heat until the pasta is ready.  Just before draining the pasta, add a good-sized splash of pasta water to the pan with the pesto sauce and return it to the heat – eyeball it, this step is to make the sauce less thick.  Drain the pasta, toss in the warmed pesto sauce, top with Parmesan cheese and serve!

Cooking the endive cut the bitterness of the green and the result was a really nice fresh, spring pasta dish.  This is a great non-salad way to use up chicory greens.

Pea Tendril Salad with Roasted Beets and Garlic Scapes

Produce used:

• Pea Tendrils
• Endive
• Garlic Scapes
• Red Beets
• Fresh Dill

With all of the fresh greens we’ve been getting I’ve been having salads for lunch pretty much every day.  This is a more substantial salad and the flavor of the roasted beets and scapes really complemented the light fresh flavor of the pea tendrils, with some spicy endive for good measure.

To make the roasted beets I peeled and sliced them on the mandoline then spread the slices on a cookie sheet with some drizzled olive oil and salt and pepper which I roasted in the oven at 350 for about 10 minutes.  I did the same with the scapes on a different pan so the beet juices wouldn’t dye the scapes.  Roasting scapes smell amazing!  The whole house smelled like roasting garlic.

While the veggies were roasting I thoroughly washed the pea tendrils and endive then chopped them into smaller pieces.  In a large bowl I squeezed half a lemon, 1 tbsp of olive oil, 1/2 tbsp of cider vinegar and lots of chopped fresh dill and then stirred everything together to make a lemony dilly vinaigrette.  I added the greens to the bowl and tossed them in the vinaigrette and then added the beets and chopped up roasted scapes.

Verdict: this was a wonderful, easy and fresh tasting salad.  I loved the dill vinaigrette and will definitely be adding fresh dill to future salads.  This salad would probably be good with goat cheese sprinkled on top – I always think of goat cheese with roasted beets.  Pea tendrils taste delicious but they’re TOUGH.  The salad was very filling but may also have been so filling because of the amount of work to chew the tendrils.  I wonder if a quick blanch would soften them up without doing away with the pea taste.  I still have a ton of tendrils left – does anyone have any recommendations on what to do with them?