What is personal growth? Is it setting boundaries? Is it picking up and sticking to (and splurging on) a hobby? Is it literally just getting swole?
Or is it simply admitting when you’re wrong? A more dogmatic person would say no. But I’ve grown! So let me say, with my whole chest: I’ve been wrong before; I’ll be wrong again; and I was wrong about pasta.
For years, I rarely craved it, finding it heavy for my tastes and often not memorable. Eventually, I convinced myself that I never liked it much at all. But lately, like the birds reconvening on my fire escape, I’ve been singing a different tune.
As my colleague Krysten Chambrot pointed out this week, pasta may very well be the food best suited to spring, a season that lacks a defining dish. “If summer has its ice cream and grill smoke, fall its casseroles and roasts, winter its soups and stews, what are spring’s hallmarks?” Krysten writes. “The warming weather calls for something fresh and bright, but the lingering chill still demands something with heft. Is this … pasta’s time to shine?” Is it ever.
Ali Slagle’s lemony orzo with asparagus and garlic bread crumbs is spring incarnate — bright, grassy, herbaceous, a breeze. Is the crunchy confetti topping what pushes this recipe into five-star, 10,000-plus-ratings territory? You be the judge.
Lemony Orzo With Asparagus and Garlic Bread Crumbs
Eating orzo feels more like eating rice than anything else; it’s a gateway shape for the pasta-averse. Melissa Clark draws on that similarity with her five-star recipe for one-pan orzo with spinach and feta, evoking the Greek spinach and rice dish spanakorizo. Loaded with seasonal darlings like scallions, baby spinach, peas and dill, it’s ideal for ringing in today’s equinox.
Spinach and feta. Does it get better? With potato gnocchi, it just might. Hetty Lui McKinnon, too, channels the dazzling duo, inspired instead by spanakopita for her textural crispy gnocchi salad.
Once the bell flowers begin to bloom in late spring, turn to campanelle — Italian for bellflowers, or little bells. The petal-like pasta, combined with asparagus, peas and mint in this creamy pasta recipe from Melissa Clark, create a garden Monet would envy.
Before it gets too warm, though, you’ll want to make Khushbu Shah’s saag paneer lasagna with some comforting lasagna sheets. Verdant with spinach and cilantro, her recipe winks at sunny spring days despite knowing that its warming spices are better suited to chilly evenings.
But with my renewed appreciation for pasta comes some strong shape preferences. When it comes to long noodles, chewy and hollow bucatini reigns. In Alexa Weibel’s four-ingredient vegan creamy leek pasta, a silken sauce made of leek oil and puréed boiled leek greens carpets the bucatini like moss on a forest floor. It’s a genius, no-waste recipe, making use of those darker leek ends that are often tossed or composted.
Similarly saucy and mossy is Andy Baraghani’s extra-green pasta salad, which is rich with miso, fresh with basil and crunchy with snap peas, and features the indisputably best pasta shape: rigatoni. I’ve been wrong before — but not about this.
Creamy Asparagus Pasta With Peas and Mint
Crispy Gnocchi With Spinach and Feta
Extra-Green Pasta Salad
One More Thing!
A very happy Nowruz, which begins today and runs for 13 days, to those observing! Andy has five stunning new recipes to help you celebrate. “Each dish,” he writes, “each ingredient symbolizes something greater.” There are herbs, of course, to embody rebirth. Together, his ash reshteh, sabzi polo, kuku sabzi and mast-o-khiar manage to cover nearly every shade of green.
And to those celebrating the season finale of “Severance”: The food on the show is mysterious, but important, writes Tejal Rao.
Thanks for reading, and see you next week!
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