September 13, 2011

Lemon and Goat Cheese Pasta with Asparagus

I love pasta, always have and pretty sure I always will. I also have grown to love goat cheese so when I came across this recipe, I had to try it and of course had to muck with it.

Ingredients
1 box pasta
1 bunch thin asparagus
1/4 cup olive oil
1 lemon for grating
2 tsp fresh chopped tarragon
4 oz log of goat cheese
1 package chicken sausage (found where the hotdogs are. we used apple champagne!!)
Salt and pepper to taste
Lemon juice (optional - I didn't need it)

Directions
  1. Chop asparagus into 1 inch pieces
  2. Grate 1 lemon
  3. Cut up chicken sausage and saute in pan until heated through and browned
  4. Cook pasta according to directions. With 3 minutes left to cook, add the aspargus to the pasta.
  5. Cook 3 more minutes
  6. Drain pasta/asparagus and reserve 1 cup pasta water
  7. In a large bowl, combine olive oil, lemon peel, tarragon and crumble in the goat cheese
  8. Stir together and add pasta/asparagus and chicken sausage with some splashes of the pasta water
  9. Stir until goat cheese is melted. Add salt/pepper to taster. If needed, add more water/lemon juice (I didn't add more lemon juice).
As we were eating this, I started thinking what else I could have added - roasted red peppers and mushrooms were the first to come to mind. Joe would have used two packages of the chicken sausage. Experiment - let me know how it turns out.

1 comment:

Shan said...

This sounds *great*!