Seasonal Winter Cookbook by Martha Stone

With those caveats, I'd recommend making this, as it is very bright and tasty. Next time, I'd make the full amount of pesto and keep some to the side to use on another dish (like fried eggs!). I have noticed this from several recipes in the book-we even decreased the olive oil by about half, and the salad was still swimming. Second, there is way too much carrot pesto/olive oil/liquid in this dish compared to the proportion of carrots and squid. I think a bit of crunch from nice, long-roasted carrots would have been welcome here. He has several carrot recipes that involve pan-searing, and I have found it takes forever and just doesn't give as nice a result as throwing them under the broiler. First, I think the carrots would have had a much nicer texture, and been easier to cook, if they'd just been roasted. But I had a couple of issues with this dish. I agree that the flavors are really nice and vibrant here-the carrot top pesto is really delicious. Not complaining, since it's delicious and will freeze well, but just a note that you will get a ton of sauce (which makes sense with the amount of lamb and veggies involved). One thing to point out-the recipe only calls for 1/2lb of pasta, which is way too little! We have enough sauce for at least 1 1/2lb. The result is super delicious and rich from the pat of butter and grated cheese added at the end. I simmered for a bit over 45min and added beef stock as needed when the sauce got too dry.

It seemed like it was wanting some extra savory flavor. I also think this sauce could benefit from a dollop of tomato paste simmered in at the beginning, with the veggies. Next time I'd decrease by 1t and add salt back as needed at the end. 5t and it was still bordering on too much once all the cheese was added. The recipe as written is a bit too salty-I decreased the total amount of salt by. As soon as I saw garlic scapes at my farmer's market I knew I needed to give this a try. The flavor of this salad was decent, but never again. The photo shows chunks of firm egg yolks, which I would have preferred, because the liquid yolks made the dressing situation even worse and more gloppy. Anyway, the other problem for me was the soft-boiled eggs. I think slicing or crushing the new potatoes rather than leaving them whole would have helped with this, but he specifically instructs to leave them whole.

The author says in the headnote that the salad will absorb all the extra liquid, and that was not the case at all. I even weighed all the veggies to make sure I was using the correct amounts, so I don't think this was a case of user error. Between all of the lemon juice and the massive amount of olive oil, the salad is swimming in murky, sardine-colored dressing, which looks disturbingly unappetizing. We only used 1/4c and still found it to be too much. First and most problematic is the amount of olive oil added to this salad-1/2c.

Seasonal Winter Cookbook by Martha Stone