Pasta in a brown butter sage sauce*

*with roasted cauliflower, caramelized onions, and chickpeas



There is no point to listing out all the ingredients for a pasta dish in the title, because it just makes the title really, really, long. Hence the asterisk. This was another one of those pasta dishes where everything in the fridge gets cooked and put on the pasta. I thought it was good, the butter tasted nutty, in a good way (although can anything be nutty in a bad way? I love nuts). I think I'm slowly learning to enjoy butter. I still won't dip artichokes or lobster in it, but if you use it to cook mushrooms or to brown and put on pasta, its alright. I've always liked it in cookies, no issue there...

Not much by way of explanation here. Give yourself at least 20 minutes for caramelizing the onions and roasting the cauliflower, but those are the only long parts. The chickpeas aren't really necessary, they didn't add much, but I like chickpeas, and they were in my fridge, and needed eating. The pasta used here was whole wheat, hence its dark color. And the onion was a red onion, which is what those purple things are.



Pasta in a brown butter sage sauce
Serves two relatively hungry people

1/2 box pasta
1 cauliflower, any color works, but the carnival cauliflowers are more colorful (purple, green, yellow)
1 onion
1-2 tbs butter
olive oil
1/2C chickpeas
3 tsp dried sage (fresh would work too if you had it)
salt to taste

Preheat your oven to 400F. Thinly slice the onions, so that they make long strips. Put the onion and some olive oil in a frying pan, and add a generous amount of salt. Stir it around so that everything is coated (add more oil as needed), and cook on medium low for about 20 minutes, until the onion is soft and starting to brown. If you taste it, it should be sweet.

Meanwhile, slice your cauliflower and let it crumble into little pieces. Toss the cauliflower with some oil, then spread it on a baking sheet. Sprinkle some salt and about a teaspoon of dried sage on top. Put this in the oven for 15-20 minutes, until the cauliflower is cooked through and a little brown on the bottom.

After you've popped the cauliflower in the oven, get a pot of water boiling. Once it boils, dump in the pasta and cook it until its just a little crunchy. You don't want it fully cooked since you'll finish it in the pan with the butter. As its cooking, make the brown butter sage sauce - I used the same pan as the onions pan. Melt 1-2 tbs of butter, and once its melted add the dried sage. Cook this for a couple minutes (should take about as long as the pasta), and take it off the heat when the butter starts to turn just a little tiny bit brown. You don't want burned butter... you want browned butter.

Once the pasta is at the barely-crunchy stage, drain it, reserving a little liquid just in case you don't have enough butter for your sauce. Add the pasta to the pan with the butter and the onions. Add the chickpeas, and toss everything around. Sautee this stuff until the pasta tastes done - you'll have to keep tasting. Mix in the cauliflower and a bunch of salt (to taste) and you're good to go.

Aaaaand another pasta dish in the books... =)