An Argument in Favor of Starch-on-Starch
Get ready for winter with pasta and lentils and other variants of pasta + starch
One of the things that delight me about Italian pasta cooking is its occasional redundancy.
To my parents, eating, say, pasta and potatoes would have been unhealthy in some undefined way and frowned upon as “starch on starch.” Yet pasta with potatoes is a great dish — especially on a chilly evening. And so is the better-known pasta e fagioli (pasta with beans, often in a particularly warming souplike version). Then, there’s pasta with chickpeas, of which I described a not-so-classic variant.
Here I shall describe our new favorite: pasta with lentils. It began a few days before with a dinner of juicy garlic sausage from the good New Jersey supplier D’Artagnan (we bought one at our local supermarket of all places). We ate ours with crushed potatoes dressed with olive oil and lemon juice, and little lentils (these were lentilles du Puy, from France, but any green/brown variety will do). You may favor a different way of cooking lentils: Use it, by all means. The point is to have some flavorful cooked lentils and lentil broth.
I cooked half a pound (225 grams) of lentils thus after soaking them for a few hours (quantities are mere suggestions):
