Pappardelle Pasta and Collard Greens

Pasta. I love it. If I had to choose between rice and pasta, pasta would win. I was telling this story today:

When I was little, I turned to my mom one day and told her I wish we could eat noodles more because noodles were way better than rice. My mom, ever pragmatic, said I only thought that because we ate rice every day. She said if she fed me noodles every day, I would soon tire of them and want rice. At the time, I thought perhaps she was right. Later, I found out she just said it because she likes rice more than noodles and didn't want to have to cook noodles all the time. Years later, with a kitchen of my own, I've discovered that while I like rice more than I did as a kid, I really can eat noodles in various forms for weeks on end and not tire of them.

I finally bought fresh pasta from The Pasta Shop today. In the Bay Area, you can go to their store in Berkeley or find their products in fancy food stores. I got some thick, flat pappardelle and defrosted the meat sauce I made a few weeks ago. My meat sauce wasn't much to speak of, but the pasta made it divine. With the memory of Il Borgo's fantastic fettucine bolognese fresh in my mind, I have to say The Pasta Shop might have a leg up even though I bought the package in the refrigerated section of Whole Foods (edit: CH Addict says that comment sounds really bad, so I'll add that it's probably just because I prefer pappardelle to fettucine. That, and I can be quite a hasty judge. Not the most level head in the room, if you know what I mean). After ninety seconds in boiling water, the pasta was tender with just a little spring to it. It soaked up the saltiness of the sauce nicely, and did not keep getting softer as I ate. The pasta was so good I didn't need a lot sauce to enjoy myself. $3.50 bought me enough pasta for three meals. Not cheap compared to $1.00 dried pasta, but well worth the increase in quality.

The side dish tonight was collards and onions. I thinly sliced some onions and threw them in a hot pan with some garlic and canola oil. The collard leaves were taken off the stems, rolled tightly, and sliced into thin ribbons. When the onions became translucent I added the collards and some sea salt, and stir fried until the greens were completely wilted. This was the first time I had non-Southern collards, and I liked them quite a bit. In addition to being much less time-intensive than collards slow cooked with a ham hock, this dish tasted fresh and crunchy. I thought the collards would be quite bitter, but they were just barely bitter with a balancing sweetness from the yellow onions. This experiment went so well, I might even throw tradition to the wind and try stir frying the stems tomorrow. Such derring do!