OmniVeggie

My mom was a culinary whiz. She had to feed five people at once and make due on a teacher's salary. I don't know how many teachers are reading this, but I will tell you teachers do not get paid what they are worth. There were nights that she would make Roast Beef and Mashed Potatoes, or Eggplant Parmesan or any number of awesome dishes. Then, there were the nights when we would come home and ask, "What's for supper?" Necessity being the mother of invention (the necessity being a meal on whatever we had left in the house), she would reply,
"God only knows" which was the cue that meant we were in for a surprise.

And to be honest, so was she.

Tonight's dish was totally a God-Only-Knows Supper here in Astoria. We spent all day figuring out how to make our template look nice, and how to add pictures and add formatting and this and that and the other thing. We watched Spider-Man 2 and Goodfellas, two very different movies and we were both still in our pajamas by 6:30pm.

"What do you want to eat tonight?"

"Eh."

I was still assuming that I had to be up at 2am to go in to the set. Hannah sighed.

"Well, I don't know either."

It was shortly after that that I got a phone call telling me that I didn't have to go in until 8 and that all was well with the world. Huzzah! We could eat normal foods.

"Ok, what do you want to eat?"

"Eh. Nothing terribly complicated."

And so our God-Only-Knows Supper for February 17th, 2008 was created. We went to Urban Vegan to get the idea and then improved upon it. Ours has whole wheat penne, chickpeas, sun-dried tomatoes (which neither of us hated, and we both hate sun-dried tomatoes...like capers. yugh.), pinenuts and fennel. Fry that all up in a pan with olive oil and you are set. It's a little more complicated than that.



Paired with a bowl of steamed broccoli and a nice Mason jar of water, who would want anything else? God only knows.

Whole Wheat Winter Pasta
Adapted from The Urban Vegan
Yield: 3-4 servings

Ingredients
Whole wheat pasta (we used penne)
½ of a large bulb of fennel (with fronds, if you have them)
3 cloves of garlic
15 oz. chickpeas
1 heaping tablespoon of pignoli
3 or 4 oil packed sun-dried tomatoes, sliced thinly
1 lemon, the juice of
¼ cup pecorino romano cheese
extra virgin olive oil
1/8 tsp. crushed red pepper flakes
salt and pepper

Bring salt and peppered water to a boil.

While you’re waiting, sauté thinly sliced fennel in about 1 ½ tbsp. of olive oil in a large pan for about 5 minutes. Add the minced garlic and continue cooking. When your water is ready, add the pasta to it, and the chickpeas to the fennel and garlic mixture, sprinkle on red pepper flakes and a dash of sea salt. Cook over medium heat until the pasta is al dente.

Using a slotted spoon, transfer the pasta into the skillet (bringing a little of that starchy pasta water with you). Add the sun-dried tomatoes, drizzle with lemon juice and fennel fronds, and serve. We like to add the cheese when it is in our bowls so that our leftovers (should there be any) aren’t gummy and/or crunchy from pre-melted cheese, but of course you may cheese as you like.* Finish it off with a drizzle of very grassy green extra virgin olive oil (this part is definitely not optional. Trust us).




*if you are a vegan, please feel free to substitute coarsely ground sea salt for the dairy