Yogurt and Garlic Pasta

I took a 5-day  gallivanting road trip a couple of weeks ago to play with old friends and knitting.

Before I left  I cleaned out the refrigerator. The day after I got home I needed to hustle up a pot-luck dish to take to Blessings and I’m tired of driving so I looked at what I had on hand. This is a major theme in my food world. I ALMOST NEVER, EVER, SHOP FOR THE INGREDIENTS FOR A RECIPE. Instead, I keep things around that I know I like and ‘cook’ from those. I shop my cupboards far more often than shopping at the store. This saves me time and money, especially because when I cruise the grocery store I buy what’s on sale if it’s one of my staples.

I found four things I almost always have in the larder:

yogurt, salt, garlic, and pasta. The pasta is Trader Joe’s Organic Whole Wheat Penne, but you can use any type. The yogurt is plain Nancy’s Nonfat. Plain is important.

Next I got out my mortar and pestle and pulled some cloves from the garlic. A lot of cloves.

In my neighborhood garlic is planted in late fall and harvested mid-summer. That means that by late spring, most garlic has lost some of its flavor, and is softish. This garlic is a freshly harvested, very pungent rojo (red) variety. Small cloves but full of oil and hot stuff. Perfect for this dish.

Lay them on the cutting board along with your biggest and heaviest knife. Mine was hand made from an old saw blade and its blade is 8.5″ long. I lay it flat in on top of the garlic cloves and give the blade a thwack or two with base of my palm. This breaks the outer skins and makes the cloves easy to peel.

My mortar and pestle are not perfect for this job. They’re unglazed porcelain. They don’t have much bite for grinding anything other than dried herbs, but I use them anyway because they are what I have. I add the garlic cloves and some coarse sea salt and grind the heck out of them.

Now is the point at which enquiring minds will ask, “Why is she grinding the garlic rather than chopping or mincing it? ” And the answer is I want to smash the oil out of it, which gives it a stronger flavor. That and the oil mixes readily with the yogurt. You could also use a garlic press which crushes the cloves. You could also use a wooden spoon in a bowl, two wooden spoons nestled together, two forks and a plate . . . invent a technique using the tools you have on hand. I use this technique because this is how I learned it from a Greek lady.

Next, I put a large dollop of yogurt into a bowl, about a cup-and-a-half to two cups, [here’s another theme: I SELDOM MEASURE INGREDIENTS] and add the garlic-salt mixture:Then mix it all together with a fork or spoon or rubber spatula (or I suppose you could use your finger but it would be messy).

Next, cook your pasta per instructions on the package except you don’t need as much water as they say. I cooked the whole pound in my four liter pot a little over half-filled with water. That’s just over half the water they call for. Just pay attention and keep the lid ajar.Now if I had had company here for dinner, the table would have been set, the lettuces salad made but not dressed until the last minute, and I would have combined the pasta with the yogurt sauce and served it. It would be time to eat immediately after the pasta was drained.

As it was, I was going to a pot luck and a Blessings sister had called an hour earlier to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ and she told me she was bringing fresh basil pesto. We decided it would be nice on the pasta as well, so I dished it out like this:

I had to drive about 20 minutes and we ate another half-hour after that but I didn’t worry. This dish does fine at room temperature.

LEARNING OPPORTUNITIES:

1. Unless the Fourth Hungarian Regiment is coming for dinner, don’t cook a whole pound of penne. It makes A LOT. I made 3 to 4 times more pasta than we ate. There was a pasta salad there (which doesn’t happen too often. We never plan who’s bringing what. We all just make what we feel like making that day) and lots of other goodies including a to-die-for-from-scratch-chocolate-birthday-cake. Even after I gave away some of it, I brought over a quart home.
2. Don’t mix the sauce with the pasta until you’re ready to serve it, otherwise it gets absorbed by the pasta which becomes bloated (i.e. no longer al dente) and starchy. Eeewwww.  I learned this years ago but it’s relevant here.
3. Can you freeze cooked pasta? None of us knew so I came home and promptly put a quart of it into a yogurt container and popped it into the freezer. I’ll let you know the results when I take it out.
4. This sauce, with much less yogurt, is great medicine for a sinus infection or cold. It’s hotter than heck but safer for you, and for me more effective than, antibiotics. Serve it on crackers, hold your nose and dive in. Good (organic), fresh garlic is good medicine. I know this because my great-grandmother (and generations of my ancestors before her) was the village healer. Modern medical research is finally catching up.

p.s. It was a hit. I’d never taken it to Blessings before and most of the sisters loved it. A couple kept remarking that they never would have thought such an odd combination could be so good. That’s only because they haven’t hung out with the right old Greek ladies.