Tom’s Kitchen: Summer Veggie Pasta With Chickpeas and Walnuts

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


In Austin, where I grew up and where I’m spending time now, summer arrives with the subtlety of a two-by-four to the back of a head. You wake up one day, and suddenly its 95 degrees and humid—and not getting cooler until October. It’s barely June, and we’ve already crossed that threshold.

But I’ve noticed an important compensation for the brutal heat: Peak-season summer produce arrives early, too. In the high country of western North Carolina, where I’ve lived for years, we don’t start harvesting green beans, garlic, and squash until July, and tomatoes don’t come in until August. On a recent Saturday visit to Austin’s excellent inner-city Boggy Creek Farm, I was surprised to find all of that and more on display.

So I grabbed a bunch of it and did what I have done so often at Maverick Farms with similarly excellent produce: minimally cooked it and tossed it into a pasta, goosing it with chickpeas, walnuts, and Parmesan for a little extra flavor and protein.

Summer Veggie Pasta
2 handfuls slender green beans, such as haricot vert, stem end snapped off
Extra-virgin olive oil
Sea salt
3-4 small-to-medium summer squashes, trimmed at each end, quartered lengthwise and cut crosswise into quarter-inch wedges
3-4 cloves of garlic, minced fine
1-2 pinches red-hot chile flakes
3-4 ripe, plump tomatoes, coarsely chopped
1 good handful of basil leaves and and another of parsley leaves, chopped together
1 pound pasta (I used Bionaturae brand whole wheat spaghetti)
1/2 cup walnuts, lightly toasted and coarsely chopped
1 15 oz can chickpeas, drained (I’ve been using Eden Organic, which are BPA-free)
About a half cup freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, plus a block of same at table for grating
Coarsely ground black pepper

Steam the green beans until they’re barely tender but still have a good snap, using a steamer insert in a covered pan or whatever steaming method you have at hand. (Alternatively, you can drop them into boiling, salted water, taking great care not to let them overcook.) Remove the green beans into a colander and shock them with cold water to stop them from cooking. Set them aside on a cutting board, cut them into bite-sized pieces, and set aside.

Place a large skillet on the stovetop and turn heat to medium. Cover the bottom with olive oil, and when it’s hot, add the sliced squash along with a pinch of salt. Saute the squash, stirring frequently, for a minute or two. Add the garlic and chile flakes, and let them cook a minute or two, stirring. Now add the chopped tomatoes and another pinch of salt. Cook until the squash is just tender and the tomatoes are warmed through. What you will have in the pan will be pretty juicy. Resist the temptation to reduce away the tomato juices. If you do so, the squash will become very mushy. This dish is designed to celebrate the season’s first tomatoes, so I barely cook them and retain their juices as part of the sauce. Add the chickpeas, and remove pan from heat.

While you’re fussing over the sauté, prepare pasta using the great food science writer Harold McGee’s simple, radical, low-water, fast method (which generates a valuable pasta pot liquor that you’ll be adding to the skillet later).

Just before the pasta is done, add a ladle-full of the pasta water to the sautéed vegetables. Drain the pasta and return it to the now-empty pot you cooked it in. Dumped the sautéed vegetables on top of it, along with the cooked green beans, the toasted walnuts, and the chopped basil/parsley, and the grated Parmigiano-Reggiano. Add a good lashing of your best olive oil, and gently toss it all together. Taste. This dish is an excellent illustration of the power of good salting. If it seems bland, add a bit of salt, toss, and taste again, repeating as necessary, but taking care not to over-salt. You’ll note that when the salt reaches its proper level, the vegetables and herbs in the dish will emerge in their rightful vibrancy.

Serve, inviting people to grate extra cheese on their plates at table.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate