Serious Eats: Recipes
Dinner Tonight: Pasta with Salmon, Peas, and Pesto
When I planted a seedling of basil in my window box a couple months ago, I expected a few leaves to garnish some homemade pizza, tuck between slices of tomato, and, by the end of summer, perhaps eek out a little batch of pesto to dress an afternoon snack. But man, basil just grows; in a matter of weeks it's grown to ten times its original size and blessed me with more than one batch of pesto already.
As much as I love the simplicity of homemade pesto with al dente pasta, I found myself with a piece of wild salmon and fresh peas the other day and set out to make it into dinner. While cream would be an obvious choice for saucing the pasta, I turned to yogurt instead, building off this previous Dinner Tonight recipe. Turns out the addition of pesto into the yogurt--which is thinned with a little vegetable stock and clings to the pasta beautifully--is an unexpected but wonderful twist. It adds a lovely tang and makes the dish just that much richer than pesto alone.
Salmon and Pea Tagliatelle
About the author: Blake Royer founded The Paupered Chef with Nick Kindelsperger, where he writes about food and occasional travels. He lives in Chicago.