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In preparation for a warm Easter this year, I made a bright and crisp pasta salad to go along with Easter dinner, a Virtual Easter Dinner, that is. I’m joining up with a group of fabulous women to bring you a full Easter Dinner menu, just as we did for Thanksgiving.

Virtual Easter Dinner Potluck

• Monday ~ Laura from Real Mom Kitchen shares Orange-Glazed Ham
• Wednesday ~ Tara from Unsophisticook shares Cucumber Salad
• Thursday ~ Tiffany from Eat at Home shares Goat Cheese Biscuits
• Friday ~ Aimee from Simple Bites shares Rosemary Potato Strudel
• Saturday ~ Liz from Hoosier Homemade shares an Easter Dessert

I have a love affair with using orzo pasta for pasta salads. I love how tiny and slippery it is, and the dressing coats well. This one starts with thin and crisp asparagus, shallots and garlic.

We’ll also need the juice and zest from a lemon, artichoke hearts and sun-dried tomatoes.

Start by dicing the asparagus into 1-2″ sections. When choosing asparagus, choose the thinnest spears you can find. They are most tender and the least woody. Blanch the spears in boiling water for 2-3 minutes. This is just long enough to cook them so they aren’t completely raw but still retain their snap. While the spears are blanching, sauté the minced shallots and garlic lightly.

Mix up a simple dressing with white wine vinegar, lemon juice, salt and pepper and olive oil.

Add all the salad fixings to the bowl: orzo pasta, quartered artichoke hearts, julienned sun-dried tomatoes, asparagus, shallots, garlic and dressing. Mix it all together and let it cool and combine in the refrigerator.

I personally couldn’t help myself. I ate this for lunch, even though I was supposed to be saving it for dinner. It’s the perfect light side dish, and the bright flavor profile pairs well with the richer dishes at Easter like Aimee’s rosemary potato strudel.

Get Grillin’ with Family Fresh Cooking and Cookin’ Canuck, sponsored by Ile de France Cheese, Rösle, Emile Henry, Rouxbe and ManPans.

I have been craving pasta lately. While doing one of our menus I suddenly realized I’d added three pasta dishes to a five-day span. Carb overload. I adjusted the menu to just one pasta meal, albeit begrudgingly, and left this gem on the menu, and I was not disappointed. It may have had something to do with the giant tub of blue cheese I had purchased to make a tomato salad for a potluck, to top my maple-glazed steak salad and for this pasta.

Orecchiette means “little ear,” which effectively means it’s shaped like a shallow bowl. A shallow bowl that acts as a suction cup to trap the blue cheese and the onions right inside there so that every bite is full of flavor and deliciousness. Start a pot of water boiling for these.


So, you’ll need an onion, make it a big one. Quartered and cut into thin slices.


I’ve had these shallots sitting in my fridge from the garden. If you aren’t looking to spring the extra $ for the shallots, an additional onion will serve you just as well. In this case, because we’re cooking them together, the shallots will sort of melt and disappear into the onions and create almost a creamy sauce that we’ll toss with the pasta.


Melt the butter IN the oil over medium-high heat, and once it’s nice and sizzling, toss in the thinly sliced onions and shallots. Keep it going, and come back to it every once in a while while we’re doing the rest of this. They’ll need a while to brown.


Pour yourself a glass of wine to sip while you cook and your kids do their homework at the table. Ole chose Sebastiani’s Secolo that we bought on a trip to California. He gets liberal when uncorking wines in the fall because he knows that we’re set to return soon. (Side note: When did Kumquat get such long hair? And where was I?)


In a separate pan, heat a tablespoon of oil and add a bunch of salted and peppered chicken. Then toss in a bit of rosemary. Keep cooking it until it browns on both sides. Right at the end, add a bit of garlic for good measure. What would pasta be without garlic?


Chop your chicken into bite-sized pieces, perfect for stabbing with a forkful of pasta. We used tenderloin strips, which meant slicing resulted in the appropriate size, but breasts would have worked just as well.


Don’t forget to stir your onions through this whole process. Just let them continue cooking and cooking until they get to a lovely brown color.


When your pasta is done, drain and add to the onions. After stirring them together, we added a scoop back to the chicken pan and gave it a swirl to collect the leftover juices and then tossed it back in with the rest. Add a heaping of blue cheese and your chicken and stir.


Finally, because I’m a sucker for cream sauces, add a bit of cream to stir in and hold it all together.


I may have tasted it before I served anyone. May have.


We ended up with about 3 lunch-sized servings left after everyone had had their fill, and it reheated wonderfully. In fact, I dare say I enjoyed it more for lunch on Day 2 during nap time. I love the quiet that nap time brings.

While this lemon chicken pasta salad could function as a side dish or a potluck item, we eat it on top of a bed of organic spring mix greens as a meal. It’s fantastic paired with garlic bread or pesto cheese bread as well or even just a few raw vegetables for dipping. It’s easy to make ahead, and it stores well in the fridge. As with any creamy pasta salad, it absorbs the moisture the longer it sits. If this bothers you, simple stir in a tablespoon of milk or two tablespoons of ranch dressing for every three or so cups of salad to restore the creamier texture.

This recipe was requested by Adrianne when she saw it on our weekly menu. I can’t blame her. Lemon, chicken, pasta. I’d be intrigued too. While I wasn’t planning on posting it originally, I decided it was a fantastic time to share a new upgrade to the site. We started making the recipe card at the bottom of the post printable!

Click the lemon chicken pasta salad recipe cardto see what it will look like printed out for your recipe box, folder or whatever you store recipes in. If you subscribe, you may have already seen them as a few of them accidentally came through over the weekend while we were setting them up. We are really excited to offer this feature, and we hope you find the printable view useful!

Our initial reason for gardening, before we even owned our own home, was to make pesto. We had always enjoyed pesto, and at the time with Ole in graduate school, buying the often expensive jar of it at the supermarket wasn’t something we were willing to do. And the “pesto pot” was born. The pesto pot is nothing more than a pot planted with Genovese basil and flat-leaf parsley. If you don’t have basil and parsley already growing in your garden, fear not. Parsley is cheap and easy to come by fresh. Basil is also available fresh in the grocery store; however, it may cost you a bit more. Try checking out your local farmer’s market. We have a vendor at ours that sells 2 cups of packed basil for $2.00, quite the bargain price.

The other thing that drives up the price of pesto are the pine nuts. We buy ours at Trader Joe’s or from a co-op; both are the cheapest prices we’ve been able to find. If you can’t find reasonably priced pine nuts, try substituting walnuts.


I pack my leaves on the bottom of the food processor or blender and top it off with all the heavier ingredients (hold the olive oil for now). This helps to weigh down the leaves and feed them towards the blade.


After a good mix and chop, I add half of the olive oil and blend again. The last half of the olive oil won’t be added until I’m ready to use each individual serving of pesto, and sometimes not at all.


Because we went light on the olive oil, this pesto is easy to work with. It doesn’t pour well into containers, but it will scoop onto sheets of plastic wrap or into tightly-sealed containers. If using a container, make sure you fill to the top to avoid freezer burn. For the plastic wrap, just pull the corners together and twist. Fold the end under the pesto ball and you’re done.


Into the freezer bag and into the freezer for these. When I am ready to use, I remove from the freezer an hour or two before and thaw in a bowl on the counter. Just before serving, I stir in the extra olive oil I left out, reviving the pesto and making it instantly easy to work with and use.


What to do with the pesto? Try mixing it into a pasta.


Or make pesto cheese bread for a twist on traditional garlic cheese bread.


You could also mix with a bit of butter, spread on salmon and bake in the oven. Mix it into steamed vegetables or even top a steak with it. Whatever you do, enjoy it. And because you froze it, you can enjoy a bit of summer freshness in the dead of winter on those really, really cold days when the sky is gray.

It’s here. The last week of the summer is in full swing, and I am over my head in work and events and activities and last-minute to-do lists that just may very well not get done. Throw in a couple phone calls about the school book fair (remind me again why I am the chairperson for that) and three open houses for the kids, I’m starting to feel like summer is already gone. Still, determined to stretch those warm summer nights and days as long as possible, this pasta’s fresh taste will make you think you’re in the midst of it rather than running at a full on sprint towards brisk breezes and fall-colored leaves.

I realize that I’ve been using a lot of capers recently. Both here and here. This also features capers. Let’s say, however, that you are opposed to the little dots of salty joy. For both this recipes and the ones previous, consider them optional. No need to pick them out of anything if you don’t like them, and surely no need for you to forgo entire culinary experiences just because it includes something like capers. That’s the beauty of cooking, the ability to cook what you want how you want. (Don’t ask me where the wine was in this picture. In the fridge so I could drink it with the meal perhaps.)


Raw shrimp is essential here. The precooked stuff just isn’t the same, and because it’s precooked, I feel that even the lightest bit of heating tends to overcook them into something tough and rubbery, and that is definitely not what we’re looking for.


Before you do anything else, start your pasta going. I like to add a teaspoon or two of olive oil and a 1/2 teaspoon of salt to my water. The pasta absorbs some of the salt while it cooks, but not enough to make it salty, just to bring the flavor up a little, and the olive oil helps prevent stickage to both pot and other pasta strands.


To prepare your scallops, start by pulling this tiny little muscle off the side. Just give them a once over, and you should be able to find it stuck there. A little tug should be all it needs to separate itself.


Be sure to use enough oil to cover the bottom of the pan and heat until it starts to crackle if hit with a drop of water over medium-high heat.


While your oil is heating, sprinkle your scallops lightly and evenly with salt and pepper. Add your scallops to the hot oil and sear 2 to 3 minutes per side until they get this nice crust on them.


When the scallops are done, remove them to a warm plate covered in foil (because it holds the heat better) and set aside while you prepare the sauce. Over medium-high heat, add your chopped garlic and capers (if you so choose to use) to the pan and cook for 30 seconds. Next, deglaze the pan by adding the wine and lemon juice.


When the liquid starts to reduce (read = there is less of it), add your mushrooms and shrimp, cooking shrimp just until they are pink on both sides, which ends up as about a minute per side. Add your cream and continue to stir until it thickens. How will you know it’s thick? It will start coating your spoon and holding together around the mushrooms and the shrimp rather than slipping off the sides.


I like to turn the heat off and introduce the pasta to the sauce rather than the other way around. In serving-sized bunches, I run the noodles through the sauce, pull and allow excess sauce to drip off and place them on the plate. Then I top with a few more pieces of shrimp and mushrooms from the sauce. Most people have a tendency to overindulge in their pasta sauce, drowning the noodles. This way it is easier to toss lightly in the sauce in large batches.


Topped off with a sprinkle of parsley and a seared scallop or two, it is the perfect way to be forgetful and pretend the days of summer really are endless.