Tasty Recipes from Recipe Wizards

When schedules are hectic, a successful quick dish in my kitchen is one that doesn’t make a huge mess, uses minimal cookware and has some nutritional value.

Garden Primavera is one such dish. It’s chock-full of summer vegetables, uses common pantry ingredients and comes together in a snap.

Key to this dish is the angel hair pasta, which cooks in four to six minutes, and cooking the vegetables with the pasta during the last two minutes.

Angel hair pasta is my go-to pantry staple because it cooks so quickly and is versatile. The vegetables cook just enough with the pasta that they are crisp and tender but not mushy. You can cook them longer if you like. But be sure to cut them uniformly so they cook evenly.

One issue with pasta dishes is keeping the pasta warm while making the sauce.

I like to pour the sauce on just before serving so the pasta gets a nice hot coating. To keep the pasta warm while finishing the sauce, I recommend:

Draining the pasta into a heatproof colander, leaving about 1 inch of pasta water in the bottom of the pot. You should be able to set the colander inside the pot so it rests on the rim.

Place a clean kitchen towel over the colander – not touching the pasta. The heat from the water and pasta will keep the pasta warm until ready to serve.

Draining some of the pasta cooking water into a large serving bowl and leaving it there while you make the sauce. When ready to serve, pour out the water and wipe the bowl with a paper towel. Add the pasta to the bowl and pour the sauce over. The warm bowl will keep the pasta warm.

Because it uses heavy whipping cream, the sauce with this Garden Primavera is a fat and calorie splurge. You can substitute a light cream, which is sometimes labeled coffee cream, or half-and-half; just don’t bring it to a boil or it will curdle.

Gently heat it, whisking in more flour or cornstarch as needed to reach a desired consistency. Fat-free half-and-half will hold up better to the heat and provide more of a sauce-like consistency.

GARDEN PRIMAVERA

Serves: 6 (main-dish servings) / Preparation time: 15 minutes

Total time: 35 minutes

1 tablespoon kosher salt

12 ounces angel hair pasta or thin spaghetti or other favorite long pasta

2 cups fresh green beans, cut into 2-inch pieces

1/2 cup sliced carrots

1 1/2 cups fresh asparagus, cut into 2-inch pieces

1 small zucchini or summer squash (or both), washed, thinly sliced

1 small red pepper, washed, cored, thinly sliced

2 tablespoons butter

2 cloves garlic, minced

1 small onion, sliced

3/4 cup fat-free, less sodium chicken broth

2 tablespoons all-purpose flour

1 cup heavy whipping cream

1/2 cup shredded Parmesan cheese

2 green onions, washed, ends removed, thinly sliced

1/4 cup fresh snipped basil

Bring a large pot of water to a boil. Add the kosher salt. Add the pasta and return to a boil. Cook pasta according to package directions. During the last 2 minutes of cooking, add the green beans, carrots, asparagus, zucchini and red pepper. Reserve 1 cup of the pasta cooking water. When the pasta is done, drain it along with the vegetables and rinse lightly with cold water to keep the vegetables from cooking further. Transfer to a warmed serving platter.

Meanwhile, in a medium saucepan, melt the butter. Add the garlic and saute 1 minute. Add the onion and saute about 4 minutes, or until just tender but not brown. Add the chicken broth and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat. Stir the flour into the whipping cream and stir into the chicken broth mixture. Cook and stir until thickened and bubbly. Add the cheese and green onions. Cook and stir about 2 minutes more. If the sauce seems too thick, pour some of the reserved pasta cooking water in to thin.

Pour the sauce over the pasta and vegetables and toss to coat. Sprinkle with snipped basil and more shredded Parmesan if desired.

Adapted from www.mixingbowl.com. Tested by Susan M. Selasky for the Free Press Test Kitchen.

447 calories (42 percent from fat ), 21 grams fat (13 grams sat. fat ), 51 grams carbohydrates, 13 grams protein, 157 mg sodium, 69 mg cholesterol, 5 grams fiber .

LEFTOVERS?

Grilled Chicken Primavera: Cream sauces tend not to reheat well; add more cream or broth when reheating this leftover if needed. Add more vegetables as desired and serve topped with grilled chicken breast strips. You can also use this as a filling for lettuce wraps.

Bon Appetit’s September issue ranks Detroit’s Faygo Root Beer No. 1 in a tasting of at least six brands from around the country. The magazine says root beer is the newest restaurant drink trend, showing up on menus everywhere.

Besides having satisfying, complex flavors, root beer is caffeine-free and usually sweetened with cane sugar rather than high-fructose corn syrup, the magazine notes.

The magazine describes it as “dry and crisp, with a frothy head, a good bite and a long finish.”

Faygo says the drink we know as root beer was originally one of a group of beverages, with or without alcohol, called small beers. They were made with a blend of herbs, barks and roots that usually included birch, sarsaparilla and ginger. Faygo’s first root beer was called Sassafras Soda; the name was changed to Faygo Root Beer in the late 1920s.

-Sylvia Rector and Nancy Chipman Powers

Q. I have an old recipe that calls for topping canned pear halves with a mixture of confectioner’s sugar, 1 cup heavy cream, one egg, vanilla and rum several hours before serving. Would you serve this, since it contains raw egg?

A. It would depend on who is being serving. The chances of an egg being contaminated with salmonella enteriditis are very low. One study I’ve seen put the risk as low as two cases per 10 million servings of eggs. The egg industry also is working on reducing the rate of salmonella among hens, lowering the risk even more.

However, for certain people – the elderly, the very young, pregnant or nursing women, and people whose immune systems have been compromised by medical treatment for AIDS or cancer – the consequences of contamination are very bad. A single contaminated egg would be all it took for someone in one of those risk groups to get sick enough to be life-threatening.

So if you are only serving yourself, you like the dish enough to be willing to take the risk, and you are in relatively good health, it’s unlikely to be a problem. However, that also assumes you handle the sauce correctly and refrigerate it during the standing time. Even if the egg isn’t contaminated, the sauce can become unsafe to consume if you don’t follow the standard rules of safe food handling.

(Kathleen Purvis answers questions in her Ask a Cook Q&A at www.charlotteobserver.com/food. Or contact her: 704-358-5236; kpurvis@charlotteobserver.com)

Stretching from the Minho River on its mountainous northern frontier with Galicia to the dry Algarve in the south, Portugal occupies most of the western coast of the Iberian Peninsula. And though it once ruled half of the world, it has enjoyed far less of the culinary limelight than its neighbor, Spain.

It’s a pity, as Portugal is home to a diverse, soulful cuisine anchored in its austere peninsular past and seasoned by its centuries as a colonial power. Between the 15th and the 19th centuries, missionaries, sailors and settlers carried Portuguese cooking techniques to Brazil, Angola, Mozambique and parts of India, China, Malaysia and Japan. There they mingled with local ingredients to create dishes bursting with flavor, like the coconut milk-enriched moquecas of Bahia and the rich curries of Goa.

To their credit, contemporary Portuguese cooks have readily incorporated the spices and hot peppers of the former colonies into their food. David Leite, creator of the influential Web site www.leitesculinaria.com, tells the story of this evolving cuisine in his first book, “The New Portuguese Table.”

The son of Portuguese immigrants from the Azores Islands who settled in Massachusetts, Leite gives us the fresh perspective of an unwilling insider who becomes smitten as an adult by the cuisine of his family.

As a child, he writes, he wished to be “blond and blue-eyed … with a last name of Fitzgerald or Abernathy.” After his grandmother died in 1992, however, he realized that many of her Portuguese dishes had died with her, and began to document his mother’s cooking: “I fervently jotted down whatever she did, because the last thing I wanted, as she likes to put it, was for any deathbed recipe-dictation sessions to be cut short by the big guy upstairs.”

The turning point in his growing culinary fascination was a trip to Portugal and its islands, Madeira and the Azores, where he found much more complex cuisines than he had imagined. “Discovering the similarities and differences between classic and contemporary dishes obsessed me,” he writes.

It is this quest that informs his book. Beautifully illustrated, “The New Portuguese Table” is a smart, delicious and highly personal travelogue through both memory and terrain.

For me, the proof of a good cookbook is the feeling that I must start cooking from it as I read. Leite’s book sent me to the kitchen after just a few pages to try his fried stuffed olives, a dish I came to love at a Portuguese-run hotel in Salvador da Bahia.

Then it was on to Alentejan-Style Pork with Clams (carne de porco a alentejana), a classic combination of pork, clams and potatoes in a cilantro-flavored broth. Grilled Chicken Breasts with Spicy Coconut Sauce, Leite’s version of a Mozambiquan dish spiced with devilish piri-piri peppers, was terrific, too.

For dessert I had to try his pasteis de nata, a well-known Portuguese sweet, and was grateful for the clear instructions and the tip on finding the right molds. I buy these golden baked custard tarts in Ironbound, the Portuguese community along Ferry Street in Newark, N.J., and enjoyed them warm from the oven in Macau, the former Portuguese colony in southern China.

In Leite’s book, you will not only find recipes that will whet your appetite but an endearing story of self-discovery that will send you to the kitchen – and perhaps to Lisbon to learn more about the new world of Portuguese cooking that we have been missing.

FRIED STUFFED OLIVES (Azeitonas fritas recheadas)

These briny, crunchy nibbles are perfect with cocktails, as I discovered at the posh Convento do Carmo hotel, built in an old monastery in the Santo Antonio neighborhood of Salvador da Bahia, Brazil. Coated in golden, crunchy armor, the olives came to the table piping hot as an amuse-bouche with a garlicky mayonnaise for dipping. This is my adaptation of David Leite’s recipe. (His suggested fillings include firm Evora sheep’s milk cheese, serrano or Portuguese presunto ham, tuna and anchovies.) The left-hand/right-hand coating method will keep you from getting clumps of breading on both hands. Serve with caipirinhas or a chilled, crisp, Portuguese vinho verde and a spicy Portuguese piri-piri sauce or garlicky mayo.

10 green Portuguese olives stuffed with piri-piri peppers (azeitonas verdes recheadas com piri-piri, preferably MaCarico brand)

30 queen manzanilla olives stuffed with pimientos

3 ounces Portuguese or Spanish sardines packed in olive oil

1/2 cup all-purpose flour

2 large eggs, lightly beaten with a pinch of salt and freshly ground pepper

3/4 cup Japanese (panko) or other toasted bread crumbs

Canola oil for deep frying

Drain the olives and pat dry. Place the Portuguese olives on a plate.

With a toothpick, extract the bit of pimiento from each queen manzanilla; discard (or chop and mix with the stuffing). With your fingers, take bits of sardine and stuff into each. Place them on the plate.

Place three shallow soup plates on a work surface. From left to right, fill them with the flour, the eggs and the bread crumbs.

Working in batches of 5 olives, roll them in the flour with your left hand, then dip them in the egg with your right hand. Lift them out and roll in the bread crumbs with your left hand, pressing each olive gently to make sure the crumbs adhere evenly. Place on a plate. (The olives may be covered with plastic film and refrigerated for up to a day.)

Heat about 2 inches of oil in a medium saucepan over medium heat. When it reaches 350 degrees, lower about 5 olives into the hot oil with a slotted spoon. Fry, moving them gently with the spoon until they are golden brown, less than 1 minute. Transfer to paper towels to drain. Repeat with remaining olives. Serve hot. Makes 40 olives, about 8 servings.

Source: Adapted from “The New Portuguese Table” by David Leite (Clarkson Potter, $32.50).

Note: The many variables of coating and frying make meaningful recipe analysis impossible.

(Culinary historian Maricel E. Presilla is the chef/co-owner of Cucharamama and Zafra in Hoboken, N.J. Her latest book is “The New Taste of Chocolate.”)

You can savor and save this summer with wines made from the sauvignon blanc grape. The big question, however, is: Which sauvignon blanc? And that depends on what style of white wine you like.

The grape originated in France, where it thrives in the Loire Valley and Bordeaux. Elsewhere, sauvignon blanc is available in two styles.

One is aggressive and herbaceous. The other is more citrus-flavored, crisp and inviting, the kind of white wine that’s perfect for parties. It’s the latter style that I prefer, and the wines mentioned here, in addition to being budget-priced, are good examples of that style.

From California vineyards, I like the 2008 Beckman Sauvignon Blanc from the Santa Ynez Valley, the 2007 Fetzer Valley Oaks Sauvignon Blanc, the 2007 Parducci Sauvignon Blanc from Mendocino County, the 2007 Chateau St. Jean Fume Blanc, the 2008 Kenwood Sauvignon Blanc and the 2008 Ferrari-Carano Fume Blanc both from Sonoma County, and the 2008 Morgan Sauvignon Blanc from Monterey County.

Although several South American wineries also produce sauvignon blanc wines, the best come from Chile. Among them are two very affordable choices, the 2008 Veramonte Reserva Sauvignon Blanc and the 2008 Concha y Toro Casillero del Diablo Sauvignon Blanc. The former is produced in Chile’s Casablanca Valley (not far from Santiago), where winemakers have discovered that sauvignon blanc plantings do very well. The latter is a blend of grapes from the nation’s Central Valley. Both deliver light fruit flavors that linger.

New Zealand is well-known for its sauvignon blancs, but many from that country are produced in a grassy, brassy style. Although they appeal to some consumers, they are not as universally appealing as the more subtle, softer sauvignon blancs produced in Kiwi Land.

Of those made in the latter style, I like the 2008 Starborough Sauvignon Blanc from the Marlborough region of New Zealand. It’s a delicious white that shows hints of citrus and peaches and ends in a clean finish.

Serve with: Enjoy these accessible whites as aperitif wines or pair them with fish, shellfish, chicken or pork roast. They are not suitable, however, for dishes that contain a lot of butter or cream.

Availability/suggested retail: Sold in wine and food stores, these whites range in price from $10 to $16, but most retail in the lower end of that price range.

WINE TO TRY

Selection: For those who like a white with a touch of residual sugar, the 2008 Ca’ del Solo Muscat from California is a great choice. Produced by the highly regarded Bonny Doon Winery, this easy-to-like white is crisp, yet has a slight sweetness.

Serve with: Enjoy sipping this unique white on a hot summer day or pair it with spicy Asian or Latin American food. It’s also an interesting wine to serve with herring or escargot.

Availability/suggested retail: Sold primarily in wine shops for about $18 a bottle.

Apples crunch, but pears melt.

The pear’s luxurious mouth feel explains why some Belgian pear varieties contain the word “beurre” in their name. The buttery fruit pairs well with four of the most beloved food groups: red wine, almonds, vanilla and chocolate.

One classic pear dessert, Poir Helene, named for composer Jacques Offenbach’s operetta about Helen of Troy, combines the cooked fruit with vanilla ice cream and chocolate sauce.

Since the pear is the real star of the show, The Star’s updated version of Caramelized Pears With Dark Chocolate Sauce bumps up the cocoa content because dark chocolate has been found to contain more antioxidants than milk chocolate. It also replaces the cream with fat-free half-and-half. To further reduce the total saturated fat, substitute your favorite brand of fat-free or low-fat frozen yogurt for ice cream.

Although pears contain more calories than apples, they also have more fiber. Other health benefits: small amounts of phosphorous and vitamin A.

-Shopping tips: Pears are in season from late July through spring. Unlike most fruit, pears are picked while still hard since the texture and flavor actually improve after harvest. According to “The Nutrition Bible” by Jean Anderson and Barbara Deskins, the best varieties for cooking include Anjou (sweet but firm), Bartlett (crisp and bland), Bosc (dryish and grainy) and Seckel (gritty).

The Star’s testers used Lindt 70 percent Cocoa Intense Dark chocolate for this recipe.

CARAMELIZED PEARS WITH DARK CHOCOLATE SAUCE

Makes 6 servings

3 firm but ripe pears, not peeled

2 tablespoons lemon juice

1/4 cup sugar, divided

1/2 cup fat-free half-and-half

1 (3.5-ounce) bar dark chocolate, coarsely chopped

1/2 teaspoon vanilla

1 1/2 cups frozen fat-free or low-fat vanilla yogurt

Cut pears in half vertically. Gently cut or scrape out core. Dip cut edges in lemon juice. Sprinkle about 1/2 tablespoon sugar over the cut edges of each pear half.

Place each pear, cut side down, in a large, heavy skillet over medium heat. Sprinkle 1 tablespoon sugar in skillet around pears. Cook 7 to 9 minutes or until sugar is melted and golden and cut surface of pears is golden. Remove pears from skillet.

Meanwhile, heat half-and-half in a 2-cup glass measuring cup in microwave oven on high (100 percent power) 45 to 60 seconds or until steaming hot but not boiling. (Watch carefully so it does not boil.) Immediately add chocolate to hot half-and-half. Allow to stand 3 to 5 minutes or until chocolate melts. Stir to blend and melt chocolate. (If necessary, return to microwave oven and heat on high power in 15 second intervals, stirring after each, until melted.) Stir in vanilla.

Place a small scoop of frozen yogurt in each dessert bowl. Place pear halves on yogurt. Drizzle any collected caramelized sugar over pears. Drizzle with dark chocolate sauce. Serve immediately.

Per serving (1/2 pear, 1/4 cup frozen yogurt and about 2 tablespoons chocolate sauce): 214 calories (21 percent from fat), 5 grams total fat (trace saturated fat), no cholesterol, 43 grams carbohydrates, 3 grams protein, 44 milligrams sodium, 3 grams dietary fiber.

Recipe developed for The Star by professional home economists Kathryn Moore and Roxanne Wyss.