Herself's Recipes

This is a recipe I reverse engineered from a local restaurant I frequent. It’s my favorite dish there.

1 pound penne pasta ( or other noodle type pasta )
1 jar Alfredo sauce
1 1/3 cups of crumbled blue cheese
2 cups grilled vegetables

The restaurant dices vegetables and grills them. They use; asparagus, mushrooms, red onion, zucchini, and carrots. I usually also use red peppers.

They also offer this dish with grilled shrimp or chicken in addition to the vegetables.

Cook the pasta
Dice and grill your vegetables and meat if you using it

Drain the pasta and toss with the Alfredo sauce. Divide among 4 plates.
Top each plate with 1/2 cup of grilled vegetables ( and meat if using )
Then top with 1/3 crumbled blue cheese per plate
Serve

The story says that Alfredo sauce became popular with American tourists in Italy not long after 1900. In 1927 Pickford and Fairbanks, Actors, fell in love with the dish while in Italy and brought home the recipe. In the 1980s it became far more popular and it is easy to find recipes for Alfredo sauce now, or to buy good quality Alfredo in many grocers.

This is totally easy to make and presents quite elegantly. You can use more mushrooms than the one pound this recipe requires. After all you can’t have too many mushrooms. We ate this dish in a Providence area Italian restaurant we stumbled upon one week.

1 pound of pasta, cooked and drained.
1/2 cup sun dried tomatoes packed in oil
1 cup oil ( I used 1/2 cup oil from the sun dried tomatoes and 1/2 cup olive )
1 pound mushrooms sliced, ( use various mushrooms make sure to have at least half wild mushrooms )
1/2 cup pine nuts
basil, fresh or dried and grated
grated Parmesan or Romano cheese

To make sauce:

Dice sun dried tomatoes small in a food processor
Put tomatoes, pine nuts, mushrooms and oil in large skillet and cook until mushrooms are cooked through

Put it all together:
Put some pasta on each plate
Spoon topping over pasta
Sprinkle basil over top
Sprinkle cheese over top