The Summer of Rapini
Orecchiette with rapini, olives, roasted tomatoes, and feta
This is how much I’ve come to love rapini: Lately I’ve been substituting it into nearly every recipe that calls for greens and searching it out on restaurant menus when eating out; I’m thinking about placing it in vases around the apartment in place of fresh flowers; If I were to be married, I’d seriously consider wrapping a nice grosgrain ribbon around the meaty stems and toting a bunch down the aisle as my bouquet.
Well, okay, at least the first of those three claims is true.
It’s not like I haven’t eaten rapini, also known as broccoli rabe, before; it’s just that my palate has suddenly taken a real shine to the bolder of the leafy greens (arugula and I have also become rather chummy this summer). And so I find myself in near-constant craving of rapini’s complex and pleasing bitterness, which rounds off beautifully in a simple sauté with oil, garlic, and a squeeze of lemon juice or in a merry mix of several other ingredients. Enter my new favourite pasta dish (recipe after the jump).
Despite having cooked for many, many years — I always helped in the kitchen at home and began hosting my own dinner parties when I was in high school — I’ve remained, for the most part, a RTFR cook. Moreover, I judge cookbooks like I do novels and consider a recipe collection a huge disappointment if I can’t read it cover to cover, marginalia included, and/or distinguish a narrative voice in the recipe preambles. Yet despite this familiarity with ingredients, technique, and procedure, I’ve generally shied away from concocting my own dishes. I guess I’ve always considered the cookbook writers the experts and myself the culinary amateur, one who executes instead of envisions.
Time to change that perspective.
So, inspired by a fresh bunch of spiky leafed, forest-green rapini sitting on my kitchen counter and a recipe for an uncooked pasta sauce of olives and cheese I found in the Dean & DeLuca Cookbook, I mixed and matched, added and subtracted and ended up with the recipe below. Taking the first bite, my eyes widened as I turned to Michael — “This is really good,” I declared, equally surprised and delighted. Each of the flavours is bold, but they don’t compete in this uncooked sauce; rather, the heat of the pasta melts everything into a harmonious tangle of bitter-salty-savory-sweet with a finishing kick.
My first real foray into recipe creation? A happy success.
Orecchiette with Rapini, Olives, Roasted Tomatoes, and Feta
- 12 black Moroccan olives (wrinkled skin, cured in salt and oil), roughly chopped
- 12 green cachado olives (cracked, cured in brine with herbs and spices), roughly chopped
- 2 large cloves garlic, finely minced
- 1/4 cup chopped fresh parsley
- 1/4 teaspoon (or more to taste) red chili flakes
- 1/2 teaspoon freshly cracked black pepper
- 2/3 cup crumbled feta cheese
- 1 pint roasted grape tomatoes*
- 1 bunch rapini, rinsed and stems trimmed
- 1 pound orecchiette (“little ears”) pasta
1. Combine green and black olives, garlic, parsley, chili flakes, black pepper, and cheese in a bowl and set aside.
2. Meanwhile, bring a large kettle of water to a rolling boil over high heat. Season water with salt and add orecchiette. Stirring occasionally, boil pasta as directed on package (approximately 10 minutes). Add rapini to the kettle with the pasta for the last 3 minutes of cooking time. Drain pasta and rapini, than toss with roasted grape tomatoes and reserved olive mixture. If pasta is too dry, add a splash of the cooking water and/or a bit of olive oil.
Serves 4
*On the advice of Jill Dupleix, I now add roasted grape tomatoes to just about everything: pastas, risottos, mixed vegetables, grain salads. Roasting draws out an extra dimension of flavour and intensifies the tomatoes’ sweetness. All you do is preheat your oven to 325°F (use a small toaster oven if you’ve got one rather than firing up the big one for a pint of tomatoes). Place a pint’s worth of grape tomatoes into a glass baking dish (I use a small Pyrex bowl with a handy fitted lid) and pour over a good glug of olive oil, then sprinkle generously with coarse sea salt. Cover and roast for approximately 35–40 minutes, until tomatoes are soft (if you’ve got a convection feature on your oven, you can reduce the cooking time to about 15–20 minutes). For the orecchiette recipe above, add the tomatoes as well as the oil and accumulated juices to the pasta.
