Pesto-a-No-No

For dinner on Thursday, I tried a recipe from a cookbook called The Dinner Doctor, which I got from the library. The author of the cookbook is Anne Byrn, who is best known for her book The Cake Mix Doctor, in which she takes a packaged cake mix and adds other ingredients to spruce it up. The Dinner Doctor follows the same principle, by making dinner starting with store-bought packaged ingredients. Sounds great and easy.

The recipe I decided to try first had a pretty straightforward title: "Penne with Blue Cheese Pesto, Walnuts, and Asparagus." Anne Byrn writes,

As the Cake Mix Doctor I have been asked many times, "What is the one cake from your books you would bake for yourself?" If you asked me this question as the Dinner Doctor, I would answer this penne. It requires little effort but delivers a big impact.

The recipe gets a ringing endorsement from the author, and it seemed like a winning combination. I like blue cheese. I like pesto. I like walnuts. I like asparagus. Who doesn't like pasta? I liked every single ingredient (and the only ingredients were those named in the title!), so I thought this would be a homerun. But I wasn't sure Jason would like it, so I planned on cooking a package of brats to have as backup.

In a nutshell, this is what preparing the recipe entails:

- toast nut pieces in the oven.

- boil water and cook pasta.

- throw asparagus pieces in with the pasta for the last few minutes of cooking.

- mix pesto and blue cheese in a large bowl.

- drain pasta/asparagus and toss with blue cheese pesto.

- sprinkle with toasted nuts before serving.

Easy. It came together in minutes. And I love this method of cooking vegetables in the pasta water. Funny how I'd never done that before, and then this week I've made two recipes in a row that used that method.

As I'm mixing together the blue cheese and pesto, I start to have my doubts. It's just not smelling very good. Then when I toss the blue cheese pesto with the pasta and asparagus, I'm really having doubts. I'm starting to wonder if these three strong flavors will meld together very well. It's looking beautiful, but it just smells questionable. To reiterate, I really like all of these bits and pieces, it's just that something seems wrong about combining them.

And when I tasted it, I decided rather quickly that it just wasn't working. Jason was at class so he didn't even have a chance to try it. It was a total write-off.

When a recipe fails like that, it's really disappointing. Not only does it mean having a bad meal, but it's a waste of ingredients (not to mention time and money). But I think trying new recipes and risking these failures is worth it, because there's nothing like finding a recipe that works, one you'll make again and again. Sometimes it's just hard to predict what type of recipe it will be.

I'm not going to bother typing the recipe here, since I don't care to save it and don't think anyone else should bother trying it either. :-) But if you are interested, check out that book at the library. There are a few other recipes from the book I still plan on trying, and they definitely are timesavers.

Also, this was the first time I ever tried sprinkling toasted nuts on top of pasta, and I actually really liked it! That was the best part. So maybe I'll try that again sometime.

When all was said and done, this was the dinner Jason and I ended up enjoying (but hold the mustard for Jason):