The Walnut Street Eats: Done (White) Whining

A near-stranger recently asked me which ethnic restaurants I’d tried since I moved to Fairfax in August. The conversation went this way:

Me: I haven’t really tried out a lot of places since I’ve been here. In fact, I think I’ve been out to dinner like, three times since I moved, and two of the times, I went to Olive Garden.

Him: You unironically go to Olive Garden?

While I’m sure all the Indian restaurants and Vietnamese restaurants are to die for, and I would even go so far as to say, I can’t wait to try them, I doubt I’ll ever make Olive Garden a secondary option. The reason being: I-am-head-over-heels-can’t-get-enough-of-could-survive-for-a-year-off-of PASTA.

Pasta is the everything dish. It can be as simple or as complicated as you want, it is more versatile than any food has any right to be, it pairs well with everything, it makes for a good leftover and it’s pretty to look at pre or post-preparation. Did I mention the versatility?

Before I could even say “spaghetti’, I was eating it weekly. When I was 6, it was “psketti” or simply, “sketti”. On “Psketti Night”, my mother would suggest I put “old clothes” on before dinner, just in case I spilled, and we ate it with corn and applesauce. As a young teenager, I still changed my clothes before dinner, and we ate it with salad and garlic bread. And then, in my late teens, we began using wheat noodles instead of white, spaghetti became “spawheati," I stopped changing my clothes and started being cautious instead, and we simply had salad.

It is necessary to say I haven’t grown out of pasta, but I did (a few months ago) grow tired of the ways in which I prepared it. In my kitchen, I knew pasta noodles to be fashioned one way: smothered in Ragu and bits of hamburger meat. There were a million other quick, healthy and inventive ways to use noodles. There had to be.

My Goal: find one easy pasta recipe that makes as much sense in my kitchen as spawheati

Qualities I’m Looking For: no spaghetti sauce, near-impossible to mess up, no obscure ingredients, healthy.

I began talking to people about pasta. As bizarre and/or annoying as that sounds, my friends have accepted that I have become less Lindsey: Their Friend Who Cooks and more Lindsey: The Food Blogger. Specifically, my friend Ryan: graduate student in Chicago, omnipresent Facebook persona, and naysayer-turned-supporter of The Walnut Street Eats. We were talking one afternoon, not about my blog, not even about pasta, when he said, “I made a great white wine pasta last night.”

“What’s it like?” I asked.

“Oh, you know,” he said, “good.”

He began to list off ingredients, a step-by-step recipe and immediately I knew this was the answer to all my pasta woes. I bought ingredients that afternoon, made the dish in under thirty minutes, and was fanatical over the result. So, this week I’m thanking you, Ryan, for experimenting in your kitchen, so I could make magic in mine.

Ryan's White Wine Pasta
1 defrosted boneless, skinless chicken breast
1/2 cup white wine (of your choice)
1/2 cup water
thin whole grain spaghetti
1/2 yellow squash
1/2 zucchini
fresh spinach
minced garlic
pinch or two of flour
tbsp butter
tbsp olive oil
salt and pepper to taste

In a small pot, combine 1/2 cup white wine and 1/2 cup water. Bring to a light boil, then reduce heat and let simmer for ten minutes. Add tbsp of butter, tbsp of olive oil and a few pinches of flour, salt and pepper to taste. (Be careful not to add too much flour. If you do, your white wine sauce will go from being light and delicious to clumpy and weird. You can't serve clumpy and weird to company, can you?) It should look like this:

Slice zucchini and squash thinly, and cut your defrosted chicken into small squares. Sprinkle with salt and pepper.

In a medium saucepan, combine a "shot" of olive oil with a tsp of minced garlic, or a few cloves of garlic, whichever you prefer. On medium-low heat, begin to sautee zucchini, squash, and chicken until vegetables are tender and chicken has thoroughly cooked.