I'm a fan: pasta with walnut pesto and kale

Justin Smillie is one of my favorite cooks in the world. I first met him when he cooked at Barbuto, which is one of our favorite restaurants, still. Then he was at Cookshop, another favorite restaurant, and then at The E.U., which was not, but it was worth it for his cooking. Now he's at a new place called "Smith's," and we went for the first time last week. We were Justin's guests, and he served forth - I'm not kidding here folks - a 13 course meal. And there would have been more, but we asked him to stop.

I want to make a comment here, before going on to cooking: if you are ever fortunate enough to be the guest of a restaurant cook or chef, keep something in mind: you are NOT the guest of the staff. TIP. TIP WELL. You have just had a great meal that you did not pay for. TIP WELL.

Ok, out of my system. Now to the point of this blog. Everything we ate that night was wonderful. There are parts of the meal that I liked more than others, but I did like everything. It's difficult to try to pick one favorite, but a pasta dish was up there. I couldn't pick out the flavors, so I asked, and they told me it was walnut pesto with kale. The kale I might have gotten in better light, because I could see the dark green leaves. Walnut pesto, I would never have guessed. But once they told me what it was, I went and chatted with Justin, and I can make this. And in fact, I am making it. You can too. Try it.

Kale is one of those greens that you need to know a bit about. This is a winter type of green, that grows very big, very tough and very stringy. You can get it young and more tender, and you can even get it so young that it's in a salad mix. But at this time of year, it's one of the few greens you will find, because it winters well. But it's a tough bird. To prepare it, you n eed to try to get all the leaves off of the stems. Don't be fancy, just rip em off, and you will have to cook it for a while, in a lot of rapidly boiling salted water. How long? Don't ask me. What you need to do is taste small pieces of it as it cooks, to determine when it's tender enough for you. But this is lazy work: putting the greens in salted water and letting them cook. You can handle that, right?

While they're cooking, make the pesto. I think mine is a little different from Justin's. I put 3/4 cup of walnuts into my processor with a pinch of salt. I ground those, and started adding olive oil, until I had something that was a sludgy mix of nuts and oil. The taste was good. Not the taste of Justin's but good (I suspect Justin had butter and oil in his). I didn't add cheese, and I don't think Justin did either. I suspect that, since there isn't a strong herbal presence in this pesto, adding cheese to it would have overwhelmed the nuts. So if you DO want cheese, then add it as a sprinkle at the end.

You now have your components together. Boil up some pasta - a long variety, and stir it together with the pesto, and the greens, and you have a dinner which, arguably, is good for you. No one is going to say nuts are low calorie, but kale is a nutritional power house, and you should put lots of it into the pasta.

I'm serving this with some plain grilled chicken breasts, as our pre thanksgiving day dinner. I'm looking forward to it. Give it a try, and happy holidays to all