No recipe recipe

Ah, summer. What a wonderful time to live in southwestern Ontario. Cherry tomatoes: grown locally. Asparagus: grown locally. Sweet bell peppers? You guessed it; grown locally. Garlic? Yes, it too came from an Ontario farm. The pasta may not be local but it is Canadian; it came from Montreal.

The Parmesan cheese came from Italy. If it came from anywhere else it wouldn't be Parmesan would it? And the artichokes also came from Italy.

If you think this looks good, it is. And it is simple. This dinner for two starts with 110 g of penne rigate. The packages usually call for a lot more but when cooking for two but I find less is better. I pump up the flavour and cut the calories by using more veggies and the like and less pasta.

Get the pasta going, it'll take about eight to tens minutes to cook al dente. Immediately drop the cherry tomatoes into a frying pan of hot olive oil and cover. If the tomatoes carmalize, all the better.
After a couple of minutes, add the chopped sweet pepper and the quartered mushrooms. Stir and cover.

With about three minutes left until the pasta is done, add the chopped asparagus spears. Keep the tender heads out of the mix. Stir and cover.

Check the pasta. When al dente, save a cup of the starchy, pasta water and then drain the pasta and set aside for a moment. Add a couple of cloves of coarsely chopped garlic and one chopped hot Thai red pepper with the seeds removed. If you want heat, the more seeds you keep, the more heat you deliver.
Stir the mix for a minute or two but no more. Don't blacken the garlic. It goes a little bitter.

Add the cooked penne rigate, add a little of the reserved pasta water, not all, plus add 60 g of soft, goat cheese broken into chunks. And don't forget to add the asparagus heads and the half dozen, canned in water, Italian artichoke hearts. If you like, you can sprinkle a little ground Parmesan into the mix at this time. Adding asparagus heads and asparagus now will ensure they do not overcook.

Stir all until the goat cheese has almost totally disappeared into the sauce. If more liquid is needed, just add more pasta water, a little at a time. Don't add too much. You want sauce and not water. Before the white of the soft goat cheese has completely disappeared, serve! A little bowl of ground Parmesan on the table is nice, as is a container of flaked, hot peppers.

I used:

110 g of penne rigate
dash of olive oil
just more than a dozen cherry tomatoes
1 chopped sweet pepper
5 big, quartered mushrooms
10 asparagus spears
1 big, minced garlic clove
1 hot Thai pepper
60 g soft goat cheese
set 1 cup of starchy pasta water aside (I didn't use it all.)
salt, pepper and hot pepper flakes at the table

The amount of vegetables and the like is not etched in stone. Feel free to add more of something you really like and less or even none of something you don't. Not using too much pasta and pasta water and making sure to serve while the goat cheese is still visible are the two rules I try not to break. Otherwise, the ingredient list is fairly flexible.