Pasta + Going Green

I'm not that big on vegetables. When my family would eat salad, I would eat just plain tomatoes or a chunk of a cucumber, both of which are fruits and both of which are great. I'll still eat a tomato like an apple and tongue a cucumber all on its own, no sex workshop or anything. Basically, I think most vegetable dishes are lies. People act so appalled that french fries were once considered a vegetable (source needed), yet your precious brussels sprouts are only delicious because they are fried beyond recognition and then tossed with a generous helping of bacon. Salads are wet vehicles for the fat farm that is dressing, plus they leave you in need of a snack approximately ten minutes after consuming them. I eat kale the same way everyone else does: by trickery. Some people put it in a smoothie, I treat it, along with some quinoa, like fried rice, sauteeing with soy sauce, sesame oil and garlic and only looking at my plate of food sideways so I don't really have to acknowledge it. 

Though spinach has fallen out of fashion, it was once the kale, the brussels sprout, the, if you will, wheatgrass (remember??) of its day. And so it was subject to wildly unhealthy preparations. Creamed spinach, as well as salads full of bad shit that was somehow mitigated by its spinachy presence. It also gave us a family of health-adjacent green things, like wraps, and of course, green pasta dough. Now that is a vegetable I can fuck with.

Though I usually see pictures of uniformly green pasta dough, I don't think this is achievable without vitamixing your spinach (chopped, frozen from Trader Joe's. There is no reason to use anything else) to death. My dough looked like this:

I split this bad boy in half. Not on purpose, I just got fed up making raviolis with it so I turned the rest into pappardelle. The raviolis were a stress reducer, something to do with my hands while waiting to hear the results of a job interview (which I did not hear for another week and a half and I didn't get it, so... it worked! What am I talking about again?). I was recreating a dish I'd made a few weeks back with some friends, little half moon raviolis (perfect circles thanks to my super advanced cutting device, a jam jar) filled with goat cheese and basil, smoothed out in the food processor with salt and olive oil. In fact, the stuffing of the raviolis took so long that I forgot to take pictures of the actually very pretty finished product, which I arranged on a slate tray on a bed of flour, and asked for a ravioli maker for my birthday. I ended up getting two!!!

I'm getting better at understanding dough feel, so that's good. It wasn't too scary for me to navigate the extra flour to compensate for the moisture in the spinach (as usual, the recipe called for way less than I needed). I also made the pappardelle thicker (6 setting on the crank) and cooked them only slightly, so they had a bite. The ravioli make it easy, like the gnocchi: they float when done. My confidence in cooking times grows! Then, because my "vegetable" was so pretty, I took the time to freshly grate some parm, and, of course, made a sauce out of my favorite fruit, the tomato. For that I simply sauteed cherry tomatoes, chopped garlic and chopped anchovies, then upended a thing of two buck Chuck Pinot Grigio in there, let the alcohol burn off and bam! Sauce for both my pastas. The pappardelle result looks like mush, but tasted way better than any vegetable I've had in a long time. How healthy am I?