Recipe Rebellion: Arugula

I know, two blogs in two days.
What can I say? It's raining and I have more motivation to cook when I'm not just feeding myself.

Today's featured vegetable is arugula. Also known as rocket, this is commonly found in those expensive spring greens salads.

I'm not unfamiliar with arugula. I eat it at least once a week in the fancy inexpensive salads I make at home. In fact, one of the recipes in the cookbook was almost the exact flavor profile of one of my favorite salads (arugula, goat cheese, walnuts).

So I picked a recipe that involved cooking with arugula, as I've never done that before.
I chose Pasta with Arugula and Tomato-Olive Compote.
This recipe involved a few new things for me to work with so I was excited to try it out.

I cut the ingredients exactly to the cookbook's specifications (1/4" onion, 1/2" tomato, olives quartered lengthwise) but my cheffy-sense was tingling. I had to ignore my instinct to cut everything really small. (This is foreshadowing, kids)

Things got pretty exciting (for me) when I was pitting the olives. I pitted the first one with my knife and was thinking about how this was going to be tedious. Then I remembered a weird little gadget I got in a grab bag of thrift store kitchen things at the Salvation Army.
I bought the bag for 25 cents and had no idea what these weird contraptions were. My very smart friend Sarah told me they were cherry pitters. Oh, ok. Back in the drawer and never used.
Until....TODAY!
I was stoked to find out that cherry pitters are an excellent tool for pitting olives as well.
Um...yeah, it was really exciting. Take my word for it.

Compared to yesterday's hour-long investment for not much food, this recipe was fairly easy to throw together. Sauce in one pot, pasta in another, wilt some arugula in a pan with garlic and oil.
Done.

Time to eat. And.....bleh. It wasn't very good. It was really sweet and the compote was way too chunky for my taste.










I "fixed" it table-side; added some salt and pepper, some more chiles and some Parmesan cheese.



















Much better.
I spent the better part of my meal thinking abut how I would improve this for future consumption:

• Dice the onion, tomatoes and olives the the same size and make them nice and small.
• Use less red wine vinegar (or maybe use white instead)
• Add a little dill
• Saute some diced artichokes in the garlic oil and then add the arugula.
• Finish with some feta cheese (for salt and creaminess) and some fresh black pepper.

I'm looking forward to making my version of this recipe.