April 15: Rigatoni with Asparagus, Sun-dried Tomatoes and Artichokes

For our Friday night dinner, we decided to try a recipe from Giada DeLaurentiis. Paul got started on everything before I got home from work. He also managed to take photos of what he was doing. I don't know why he doesn't document his cooking for the blog more often. I usually end up with ill-focused, dark photos and a buttery camera when I try to do it myself.



Look at those skills!

So the pasta recipe has artichokes in it, but we decided to cook up the single artichoke sent to us by the delivery box as an appetizer. We like artichokes. And honestly, I had never cooked a fresh one on my own, so that was kind of neat.

Paul cutting off the ends of the artichoke.

I was very hard at work.

I contributed lively conversation.

After trimming up the artichoke (which we read about in our fave book), Paul steamed it on the stove for about 30 minutes until it was nice and soft. We dipped it in some melted butter mixed with garlic. Yum-my.


How fancy!

After our snack break, we (and by "we," I mean Paul) got back to work. Paul chopped up the sun-dried tomatoes. 

They are slippery little guys. I'm glad Paul took this on. I am much more likely to hack a finger.

Paul made sure the hot (i.e. spicy) turkey sausage was cooked all the way through.

I did stuff for this meal, I swear. Like take non-buttery photos.

The sauce cooking on the stove includes: chopped asparagus, 2 cans of artichoke hearts (we couldn't find frozen, but these worked fine), sun-dried tomatoes, garlic, chicken broth and white wine.

Don't worry, guys. None of the wine went to waste.

Here's my handiwork -- the salad with cucumbers, tomatoes, ranch dressing and a lot of ground pepper. You also get a little sneak peak at our china! Wheeee!

The fancy china is offset by the fact that I was wearing pajamas. They are my normal cooking attire. That is why there are no photos of me on this blog.

We recently purchased and are growing our own parsley and basil, so we used some herbs we clipped from the plants.

Take that, Martha Stewart! Actually, I almost killed all our herbs a day later by forgetting that I left them outside when the temperature dropped overnight, so she pretty much has nothing to worry about.

We added the cooked sausage, mozzarella cheese cubes, chopped parsley, basil, and rigatoni to the sauce mixture. 

The cubed mozarella was optional. We opted yes.

The final product!

Mmmmm...more cheese.

We thought it tasted really good. The sauce coats the pasta well without being overwhelming. You taste all the components -- artichokes, asparagus, sausage and tomatoes. This is not a recipe where you'd want to omit one of those ingredients. The pasta was perfectly al dente, too (Paul made me write that).

It's definitely not a "light" dish -- especially with the sausage. You cook the sausage in some of the oil from the sun-dried tomatoes, which helps tie the flavors together. We cooked the entire box of pasta, so we had a lot of leftovers, which made for some tasty work lunches.*

*Sorry, work friends. No mugging me for my lunch.