Citrus & Pasta Are Best Friends

I recently joined the new site Pinterest, because I clearly don't spend enough time trawling the internet. But in the short time I've been on, I managed to find a "recipe" for a pasta featuring Meyer lemons, which I made tonight. I want to share this dish with the world!

I use quotes around the word recipe because the sources offer more of a guideline, without any precise measurements. The basis of this dish comes courtesy of The Amateur Gourmet, and I went with the smoked trout embellishment from Minimally Invasive. I don't own a smoker, so made do with some Ontario trout I picked up at my local grocery chain. Can you believe they were completely sold out of spinach, and the only arugula was the bag version?! The things I put up with for a good meal...

The temperatures in Toronto today peaked at a cutting -25^°C, so a comforting pasta dish was just what the doctor ordered. The best thing about this dish was that it also gave you a sunshiney lift via the lemons (despite them being primarily a winter fruit). If you don't know about them, they originated in China and taste like a vaguely orangey lemon. It's a less harshly acidic fruit than a regular lemon.

Okay, onto the preparation. There was some guesswork and eyeballing in my version, but here are the measurements I used, but feel free to go crazy with the amounts and ingredients.

• about 400 g freshly grated Parmeggiano Romano
• zest of 2 Meyer lemons plus juice of 1
• 2 generous handfuls of arugula (though I think I could have used another handful)
• 2 Tbsp crème fraîche
• 500 g fresh linguine
• about 75 g of smoked trout filet, hand shredded

That's it. Six simple ingredients and about 10 minutes of your time for 3 healthy servings of one of the most delicious pastas I've ever had. Seriously, it takes as long to boil the water for the pasta as it does for you to prep everything. And if you use fresh pasta, there's litereally 2 to 3 minutes of cooking time. It's a hearty, zesty, flavourful bowl of pasta and I'll definitely be making this again. Plus, look how pretty it is!

One tip for those of you taking your leftovers to the office for lunch the next day. We all know the microwave does not do great things to food, so take along your leftover lemon to spritz over your reheated pasta. It'll freshen it right up.