Editor’s Note: This week’s CSAcation started with the intent that Andrea and I would cook this dish together, and I would write it up. One of my favorite things to do is cooking with my friends, learning their tricks and shortcuts, where they skimp or embellish, how they get along with their food–those are all the things that make up a person’s individual CSAcation. Cooking with Andrea was no exception, and as we chopped and measured, I found that she had strong ties to this recipe, personal memories of just graduating college and learning to cook. I suggested she take the reins this week and write her own CSAcation, and she happily accepted.

- Dana

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Like so many, I graduated college with very little idea of how to cook for myself.

I could fry a steak or grill a burger, I could heat up leftover Chinese, I could make spaghetti with sauce from a jar, and that was about it. And so, back in 1995, I bought myself the least intimidating cookbook I could find, the Less than 7 Ingredients Cookbook, a slim paperback volume, about the size of a magazine, and costing just slightly more. I could handle seven ingredients.

Many years later, I am no longer intimidated by long, complicated recipes, and even better, I know that in everything except for baking, measuring and worrying about staying true to every detail of a recipe is simply not necessary, or even advised. I’ve learned to have fun with cooking, and how to dive into complicated multi-ingredient and -step recipes. But what I’ve learned is, above all, the recipes that I love the most are the ones with under seven ingredients, many of which are from that original post-college cookbook. Those are the recipes that highlight the flavor of the ingredients, that have the most defined structure of tastes, and are, quite simply, the most comforting at the end of a long work day. And so that is the recipe that I offer here today.

Prosciutto goodness | Pic by Andrea Nolan

Pasta with Prosciutto & Olives is fast, taking only 20 minutes to cook, including preparation time, and is both tasty and filling. It is also easily adapted for ingredients on hand, food allergies, and despite the prevalence of Prosciuto in the title, I’ve even made a vegetarian version of this that I like as much as the pork version (an adaption that I’ll include below). I made this recipe with this week’s CSA cherry tomatoes.  The recipe also calls for green onions, which although we didn’t get in the grab bag of goodies this week, is often a staple of CSA offerings.

Pasta with Prosciutto & Olives

(All the amounts below are approximates, and can easily be doubled or halved, although why you’d want to half anything is beyond me. Also, this dish makes for amazing leftovers, so even if you are cooking for just one or two, make the full recipe and then take the leftovers with you for lunch.)

8 - 12 ounces of spaghetti, linguini or any other pasta (the recipe is for 8-10 ounces of pasta, but it can easily be stretched to flavor even 1, 16 oz. box of spaghetti)

2-3 ounces of prosciutto (cut into ¼ inch wide strips)

1/4 cup olive oil

1/2 cup thinly sliced green onions (including tops)

1/3 cup (or 1 small jar) pimento-stuffed green olives (really, any green, pitted olive will do)

1 cup cherry tomatoes, halved

Grated Kasseri or Parmesan cheese (optional . . . but really, as I’ve said above, every ingredient here can be optional, substituted or modified)

Get some water boiling and cook your pasta until it is al dente. Drain (leaving just a bit of water with the pasta to keep it from sticking) and place it in a warm serving bowl (or the pot you just cooked it in). If you time things right, the pasta should finish only a couple of minutes before the prosciutto mixture.

While the pasta is cooking, heat the oil in a frying pan over medium high heat. When the prosciutto gently sizzles when touching the oil, add all the prosciutto and cook for about 3 minutes, or until lightly browned (or rather, darkened). Add the onions and cook for about 2 more minutes, then add the olives and tomatoes and cook for about 2 more minutes, or until the olives are hot. Stir, and or shake the pan, often so as to keep the olives and tomatoes from burning.

Pour the mixture over the pasta (including all that delicious, flavored olive oil), toss well, coating everything, and then serve. Or, if your pasta is cooling, you could dump the pasta into your frying pan (if it is a deep pan) and toss the pasta and mixture in the hot pan.

Grate cheese according to taste. Serve with bread to sop up the oil.

A couple of words about the cheese:

Table spread with cheese grater | Pic by Andrea Nolan

First, please, please, if you don’t already, use freshly grated cheese.  Treat yourself! It tastes so much better than that powdered stuff in the green plastic jar, and it is so easy. Pre-grate a bowl of cheese, or use a small hand-held grater at the table, or buy an Oxo grater (see picture of the dinner table), in which you put the cheese and then grind the wheel for a shower of cheesy goodness on your plate.  And the Oxo grater doubles as cheese storage.

Second, besides the rightfully familiar Parmesan cheese from Italy, consider trying kasseri cheese. A little harder to find, but available at the Ghent Marketplace, kasseri is a Greek cheese made from unpasteurized sheep’s milk (unlike Parmesan which is made from raw cow’s milk). It is a medium-hard cheese, meaning that it grates well, and is mellow, lacking Parmesan’s distinctive bite, and yet has its own distinctive strong, almost smoky tone that highlights the flavors of any pasta dish.

And now for the promised Vegetarian (albeit not a Vegan) alternative:

A few years ago a friend of mine turned vegetarian and set about adopting certain favorite meat recipes to her new diet. She found that while you could make this recipe simply by absenting the prosciutto, the result is a little bland, and so she instead adapted this by using feta instead of the prosciutto, finding that feta’s saltiness was just the right compliment to the onions, tomatoes and olives. For that adaptation, start cooking the onions first, and then toss in the feta, olives and tomatoes all at the same time. You likely want to absent sprinkling the dish with kasseri.

Similarly, using halloumi, a Cypriot cheese, is a great substitution to this meal. Even more than feta, halloumi doesn’t easily melt, and so it can be sliced into thin chunks, and then heated in the pan with the oil before adding the onions and remaining ingredients. Halloumi is made from a blend of sheep’s and goat’s milk and is salty and distinctly itself. Beyond using it as a meat substitution, it is delicious eaten as an appetizer, either fried in thick slabs in olive oil, or even better, grilled.

It’s been my pleasure to serve as the guest writer for this week’s column. Happy eating!