Tueday Night Cooking Resumes!

Tuesday Night's Menu:
New Potato, Green Bean, Basil and Pine Nut Salad
Bowtie Pasta with Italian Sausage tossed in Tapenade


Tri Colored Potatoes- the purple is so purty!

The recipe Christina used:
At Trader Joe's you can find bags of tri-colored small potatoes: purple, red and yellow. Or if you are strolling through a farmer's market you'll also spot lovely potatoes for this salad. It is a hit to bring to barbecues and so forth…I think you'll find yourself making this salad a lot!

At least 24 potatoes, or 1 bag multicolored potatoes from TJS
3 packages (1 1/2 a pound) of green beans
10 cloves garlic, peeled and chopped
One package (or a large bunch) basil, leaves picked from the stems and chopped
2 large handfuls of pine nuts, toasted
Olive oil (extra virgin first-cold pressed), for swirling
Sea Salt (Maldon's Flake Salt), for sprinkling

Cut each potato in half, and then into fourths. Smaller cut potatoes means that your have more surface area exposed to absorb the delicious dressing!
Trim the green beans by removing the stem-end. The long thin end is pretty to leave on, I think.
Put the potatoes in a generous pot of salted water and bring up to a boil. Monitor carefully! The potatoes go fast! When they are almost there, add the beans for a minute or two until bright green and still crunchy. Carefully pour into a colander and then immediately shock in cold water to halt the cooking process. (We don't want to have mushy potatoes, now, do we?). Drain, and put in a salad bowl.
Prepare the salad by adding the garlic, basil and pine nuts to the potatoes and beans. Sprinkle sea salt along with a few turns around the bowl with extra virgin olive oil. Mix (with your hands, of course!) and taste. Need anything else? More of something? This is the fun part of cooking – you bring this dish alive and make it taste wonderful. Serve on its own, over arugula, or a mixed greens salad, ever so lightly dressed with lemon and olive oil.
The result:

There was RAW garlic and I kind of ate it! Well only when the chopped bits weren't big enough to scrape to side of the dish. :P

My pasta dish for two:
Boil 1/3 lb of bowtie pasta, drain
Roll around 4 Italian sweet sausage links in a buttered pan on stove over low heat until fully cooked, then cut into bite sized pieces (I got the sausage from my local Italian market- Claros)
Chop up black olives and onion stuffed green ones along with thyme, adding extra virgin olive oil gradually between chops

There was sposed to be rosemary but stupid me forgot the last grocery bag at Albertsons (AFTER I paid for it). I also forgot to buy capers but oh well you can live without it! My coworker Fred has made tapenade for us many times but I never did it myself until now! (We're spoiled!) Anyhoo, then I mixed everything together, garnished with basil, and lightly squeezed some lemon juice over the dish.
The result:

I added sun-dried tomatoes to my dish, Christina added parmesan cheese to hers. I didn't really follow a recipe for this dish, I just visualized in my head what it would look like and I experimented from there. Thank goodness my imagination worked! :P


The hungry cooks! We did good. Mmm mmm!