Video: Matt's Lemon Pasta

In our most recent video with mom.me, Matt is getting the spotlight (as much as you can in a show called "In the Kitchen with Amelia & Teddy"). In it, we make his lemon pasta recipe, which he was kind enough to write down so that I could include it in my book. (Also getting the spotlight is our pretty new cutting board, which the kind people at Jonathan Moran Woodworks sent us. If you're in or near Pittsburgh, you should check them out!)

In other non-video news, I had a great trip to Madison, Wisconsin where the weather was everything Los Angeles weather is not. Thank you so much to those of you who came to my event on Friday night. It was super cool to meet some long-time readers and some possible new ones. My good friends Kara and Tim drove over from Michigan (with their 18-month-old!) aaaand my brother made it there too. And since Teddy stayed home with Matt, I had all of this free time to hang out with them and go to events. Sort of. The book festival overlapped with the 2015 Gymnastics World Championships, so I obviously had to spend a lot of time streaming the competition live on my laptop. That being said, my brother did hang out with me while I watched some of it and he even seemed mildly interested!

In short, happy Halloween! I just bought Teddy a super jenky ten-dollar lion costume from a second-hand shop. What do you think? Will he even want to put it on?

p.s. I have the most amazing voicemail of my mom asking me to help her get one of our videos to stop playing. I wish I could upload it here, but I don't have the technological patience to do so. Point being, apparently something happens to my mom's tablet when she watches these videos; they start going on a loop and she can't make it stop and I guess(?) she doesn't know how to ex out of a window. By the end of the voicemail, she's super frustrated, claims that she's "already tried putting it in the trash a bunch of times" and is basically like, "Make it stop!" I'm telling you all of this partially because it makes me laugh but mostly to remind my mom to watch the above video at her own risk!

Matt's Lemon Pasta ever so slightly adapted from the version in the book
serves 4

1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
3 cloves of garlic, crushed and minced
1 tablespoon unsalted butter, cut into 4 chunks
Zest and juice of 1 lemon
Salt
1 pound dried spaghetti
3/4 cup heavy cream
1/2 cup grated Parmesan or Pecorino Romano cheese, plus more for serving
1/2 cup grated Gruyère cheese
½ cup fresh parsley, chopped
Freshly ground black pepper

Heat the oil in a skillet over low heat. Drop the garlic into a pan and move the garlic around a bit, maybe for a minute or two; don't let it brown. Turn off the heat and drop in the butter. Let the butter melt on its own.

At this point you have a pretty decent sauce. In fact, you can stop here if you want. You can add salt and pepper, toss in your cooked pasta, and call it a day. But if you're making my lemon pasta, you'll need to add the zest of 1 lemon, followed by the juice of that very same lemon. Again, at this point, if you want to skip out on all the cream and cheese, you could stop here and be done. The full lemon cream pasta recipe, however, the one reserved for indulgent occasions that you care not about your waistline, requires you to continue building.

Now is a great time to start cooking the pasta: Drop the dried spaghetti into a pot of lightly salted boiling water. Stir occasionally while you continue making the sauce.

Put the sauce back on low heat and bring it to a light simmer. Add the heavy cream. (You can substitute with half-and-half or even whole milk if you already have one of them on hand, but heavy cream works best.) Drop in the grated Parmesan and the Gruyère. Stir as the sauce is brought back up to a light simmer and the ingredients are completely combined. Season with salt and pepper. Turn off the heat.

Once the pasta is al dente, strain it, add it to the pan with the chopped fresh parsley, and toss to coat it. Plate into pasta bowls and finish with a sprinkle of grated Parmesan cheese.