celebrating kitchen power tool acquisions

[kareina]

We have been without a working food processor for some unknown number of months now, and finally decided to do something about it this week, since we were in the big-box store part of town picking up supplies to run electricity to one of the sheds. For the most part food processors look more or less the same as they have since I got my first one back in highschool, but sometime reasonably recently someone in the industry came up with a brilliant idea: The one we purchased has a drawer built into it which has slots for all of the blades and graters. Yes, indeed, we were willing to pay just a little more to have a safe place to store that stuff where it would be easy to find and not at all in the way.

Having purchased the new toy it was necessary to buy some ingredients yesterday so I could play with it. The result was a lovely Spinach-Roasted Garlic sauce that I enjoyed so much I will now write down what I did this time so that my readers can try it at home if they feel for it:


Spinach-Roasted Garlic sauce

1 bulb garlic
~390 grams fresh spinach
1 medium zucchini
handful of fresh chives
~3/4 cup pistachios
~1 tablespoon grated Parmesan cheese
herbs/spices to taste (I used cilantro, pepper, and onion powder)
home-made egg noodles (~1.5 c flour, 2 eggs, dash salt, pepper)
1 T butter

First:

set a bulb of garlic into the oven at 150 C to roast

While it is roasting:

Put enough water to cook noodles later into a pot sized appropriately to take a steamer basket and set it heating.

Slice one small zucchini and set it in a steaming basket over the now boiling water and cover it.

Roughly chop a handful chives and drop them into the bottom of the food processor

Open the bags of ready-to-eat "baby" spinach (our store sells them in tiny packages, only 65 grams each, so I bought 6 of them (or 390 grams)

when the zucchini is tender add it to the food processor and put as much of the spinach into the steaming basket as will fit.

while the spinach steams add pepper and such spices as you feel for (I used only pepper, cilantro and onion powder this time) to the zucchini and chives and process enough to make it mushy.

When the first batch of spinach has steamed (only just wilted down to the bottom of the steamer, but still a nice shade of green), add it to the food processor on top of the zucchini etc. and set the next batch steaming. While the next batch heats run the food processor on the first batch. Repeat till all the spinach has been cooked and added (my steamer let me do it in three batches).

While waiting for the spinach start mixing up home made noodle dough (roughly 1 egg for every 3/4 cup of flour plus salt/pepper/other spice to taste). When the last of the spinach comes out of the steamer cook the noodles in the (now green) steaming water by slicing small chunks of dough into the boiling water (it may be necessary to turn up the heat now that there is no longer a lid on the pot). The noodles are cooked as soon as they float, which is fairly promptly after hitting the boiling water. Once the last one is in the pot give it a few seconds to boil, then drain them, put them back in the pot and stir in a spoon full of butter, put the lid on, and set aside while you finish the sauce.

In the time it takes to get this far the garlic should be ready. Extract the nice, soft, roasted garlic cloves from their papery shells and drop them into the food processor with everything else. Add a couple of handfuls of pistachios and grate in some Parmesan cheese and process till it is all smooth. Serve over the noodles. Yum! Makes about eight servings.

This was also extremely good left over for lunch today, and I put six servings of the sauce into the freezer (love my silicon muffin pan for freezing such things) for future quick meals.