Quick-Hit Pasta Recipe: Asparagus Pasta Salad

Quick-Hit Pasta Recipe: Asparagus Pasta Salad Hi! I’m Mac from pasta-recipes-made-easy with another quick hit pasta recipe, this one pasta salad with asparagus, some dried tomato, fresh mushrooms. We’re going to be doing seven steps very quick, let’s make it. Okay step one, we’ve got 100 grams or 3½ ounces of fresh wild mixed mushrooms or you can just choose one type, use chanterelle or porcini, anything really except for those kind of nasty button mushrooms. And so what we’re going to do is just chop off the stalks of these mushrooms and just so you got the heads left and we’re going to get rid of the dirt as well. You clean the bush of this off and or you can just rinse them under the tap, whatever you prefer. So you’ve got those already, we’ve also got six or seven asparagus which is the other main ingredient of this dish and just give this a bend and you find that there’s a weak point where they snap so that that’s the place and then we’re going to throw the chunkier parts away and just keep these heads. Thirdly for the preparation, we’ve got four sun-dried tomatoes from -- and what we’re going to do is just chop those up and those will go into the dish later on and that’s really it. We’ve washed mushrooms, snapped the asparagus, chopped the toms, and we’re ready for step two. Step two, we have placed the asparagus in a shallow frying pan and just enough cold water in there to cover them. We got that on a hot pot until we get it simmering and boiling away and we’re just going to boil them in that water, also add a pinch of salt and we’re going to boil them in there basically until they’re soft enough so that you can just slide a knife eagerly through the bottom, thickest part of the stem. So just a few minutes until they soften up and then we’re on to step three. Step three, while the asparagus is boiling away there, we’ve just taken a second frying pan, we’ve splashed a good glob of extra virgin olive oil in there and now we’re going to throw in a peeled garlic clove as well, stick this on a medium heat hob and you have an option as well, you can also throw in a just few, a small handful of rinsed fresh parsley leaves, flat parsley leaves which will give this a nice extra flavor. We’re just going to fry up this garlic clove until it starts to turn golden. Step four, as you can see we’ve taken the asparagus away because that’s softened up so we’ve taken that out off the heat in the mean time, our garlic’s started to brown a little bit so what we’re going to do is throw in the mushrooms now at this stage -- on a nice quite of lively heat and we’ll basically going to fry these, stirring them regularly until they shrink to about half the size and so they really wilt and get cooked very nicely. Step five, when the mushroom is just frying away and gradually softening, we’ve got a pan of pasta water here just broths to boil so we’re going to throw in a bit of salt which is about a tablespoon and where just going to wraps to that the penne pasta which is 200 grams or roughly seven ounces. Give that a good stir, bring that to a boil again and then cook exactly as its package suggest which in this case, is 11 minutes. Step 6, you can see the mushrooms are nicely wilted and softened there so we’ve taken the heat off that so it’s just going to cool down. In the meantime we’re just going to chop up the asparagus which we softened earlier and then when that’s just very pretty brawly roughly chop we’re going to throw that into the pan with the mushrooms, don’t worry about the sound the heat’s just cooling down and we’re going to also add our chopped sun-dried tomatoes give that a nice stir and then that’ll cool down just while the pasta cooks. Finally, step seven we’ve got a pasta finished there which we drained we’re just going to take the garlic out of the mixture although you can leave that in if you prefer. We’ve got our pasta which is cooked, drained and is just being cooled a little under a bit of cold water, just rinsed into cold water. We’re going to have the final glob of extra virgin and then we’re just going to garnish this with a few extra parsley leaves, give it all a great big stir and here we have it, we’re just going to -- you can actually serve this from warm but for other pastas really, give it about 10 minutes to cool down and look at that, lovely asparagus and fresh mushroom pasta salad, delicious.