Hump-Day Quickie: Broiled Mushrooms

Today we're going to make something so fast it barely counts as a recipe!

Broiled Mushrooms Mushrooms (as many as desired)* Butter (about 1 or 2 tablespoons for every four mushrooms if the mushrooms are small, or one tablespoon each for large ones), cut into small pieces Salt and pepper to taste Move the oven rack to a higher position than you use for baking, and heat the broiler to high for a few minutes. Meanwhile, line a pan with foil, and coat it with cooking spray. We recommend using a pan that has raised edges on all four sides, so the juices can be contained. Break off the mushroom stems and save them for another use. Wash the caps, and place them dome-side up on the pan. Broil them for 2½-3 minutes, until they just barely start to exude a little bit of juice. Remove from the oven and flip them over. Sprinkle with salt and pepper. Place a small piece of butter in each one. Return them to the oven and broil for another 2½-3 minutes, or until the butter is melted and the mushrooms are cooked. Serve quickly because they cool off fast. Carefully keep them open-side up so they hold on to all their juices. If desired, serve on pasta or buttered toast. *The original recipe calls for large mushrooms, but this is also delicious made with small ones. Source: Mrs. Mary Martensen's Century of Progress Cook Book (recipes from The Chicago American), 1933, via The Internet Archive

Even reading the recipe excited everyone else. When people asked what I was making with dinner, I wordlessly pointed to the book and got back to cutting up the butter. One of them stared at the page for just a little too long and then said "Woah."

We're using miniature mushrooms instead of the full-sized ones in the recipe. I know nothing about mushroom cultivation, but the prices suggest that it is difficult to raise them until they're big. Since this book came out in the middle of the Depression, I think Mrs. Mary Martensen would have understand if I fudged things for budgetary reasons. And if I wanted to be fancy, I could say these were "canapé-sized."

 

As I got these into the oven, I thought "Is this really this easy?" Like, this doesn't seem like a recipe worth writing down. But then again, I never thought of broiling mushrooms like this.

Because I wanted to do this recipe justice, I popped some bread into the toaster. (I kind of had to. If you omit the toast, you've skipped half the written steps.)

I think anyone that anyone in the 1930s would appreciate that French bread has been $1 per loaf lately (or at least, they would love the price after adjusting for inflation). In addition to rounding out dinner with economical carbs, the toast was better than toast should be after all the mushroom juices soaked into it.

These are far too good for how easy they are. One person cautiously lifted one off the pan, tasted it, then went wide-eyed and came back for half of them. 

I've seen a lot of people say "Fine dining is extra butter." Or sometimes you see people say "Don't ask how much cream is in it." And after making these, I finally get it. We had no leftovers. These are absolutely divine. You owe it to yourself.

As a final note, these are also really good on top of noodles. The mushroom juice spills all over the pasta and makes everything amazing. 

 

Cheese-Stuffed Mushrooms

To the apparent surprise of Americans who believe conservative podcasters, Canada is a sovereign nation.

Cheddar-Stuffed Mushrooms 6 large portobello mushrooms, or 1 to 1½ pounds baby mushrooms ¼ cup (60 mL) butter, divided ¼ cup (60 mL) chopped roasted salted cashews (or nuts of your choice) 5 or 6 green onions 1 clove garlic (or more if desired), minced 2 tbsp (30 mL) flour 1 cup (250 mL) milk 1 cup shredded cheddar, or cheese of your choice 2 tbsp (30 mL) soy sauce 2 tbsp (30 mL) cooking oil Salt and pepper to taste Heat oven to 425°F or 220°C. Line a baking sheet with foil.* Remove the stems from the mushroom caps and chop. Set aside. Melt half the butter, mix with the chopped nuts. Set aside. Thinly slice the green onions, keeping the white and green parts separated. Set aside the green parts. Melt the remaining butter in a large frying pan over medium heat. Add the whites of the green onions and cook for 4 minutes, or until wilted. Stir in the garlic and chopped mushroom stems. Add salt and pepper to taste. Continue cooking 8-10 minutes, or until mushrooms are cooked and most of their juice has dried. Sprinkle the flour over the pan (if you have one of those miniature sifters, it's perfect for this), stirring rapidly to prevent lumps. While still quickly stirring, add the milk one splash at a time. You can add it more freely as the mixture thins out. After all the milk is added, cook until smooth and thickened, about 2 minutes. Then remove from heat, and immediately stir in the cheese and the green parts of the green onions. Mix the oil and soy sauce. Brush them all over the mushroom caps. Then lay the caps concave side up on the baking sheet. Fill them with the cheese sauce, adding enough to almost come to their rims. Put some of the chopped nuts and butter on top of each. Bake 20-25 minutes, or until mushrooms are cooked and the cheese is golden at the edges. Serve warm. *You don't need to line the pan with foil. But come cleanup time, you'll be glad you did. Adapted from Food and Drink Autumn 2016, Liquor Control Board of Ontario

Right after election night, I said that I hoped Trump's dumber policies would inconvenience enough people who have sufficient money to influence him, thus bringing at least a little sanity back into national politics. And already, we are seeing little ripples of dismay in various top-floor offices. I would be bitterly amused if I had a lot of money to throw away on rising prices.

Liquor store employees in Canada have been removing American alcohol from the shelves as shoppers carefully avoid it. It turns out that people get irked when threatened with annexation and whapped with tariffs. Canadians may not be able to vote in US elections, but they can definitely vote with their money.

A friend sent me this picture from a store in Montreal.

 

Sinking sales over the border haven't bred executive desperation yet, but there are already signs of consternation. After all, stores never let freshly-cleared shelf space stay vacant. The president of the Kentucky Distillers' Association took to Twitter and begged Canadians to keep buying bourbon. The distillers' plea came on the same day that the Liquor Control Board of Ontario yanked American alcohol from every single store in the province. Other Canadian provinces have followed suit. 

The Globe and Mail

All of this to say, today we are getting out that magazine I took home from Ottawa's airport, and making a recipe from the Liquor Control Board of Ontario.

Food and Drink Autumn 2016, Liquor Control Board of Ontario

Or at least, we are trying to make a recipe from the Liquor Control Board of Ontario. As we have learned, a lot of the recipes from their beautifully-photographed magazine seem like they were only tested in commercial kitchens. I suspect the LCBO's recipe developers didn't always think about the realities of cooking in a house that does not have a full complement of restaurant equipment.

On a minor cross-cultural cooking note, I'm surprised the recipe writers used volume instead of weight* when writing the metric measurements of ingredients like shredded cheese and flour. I thought that people in Canada (and everywhere else that isn't the US) had kitchen scales.

We begin the recipe by making puffed wild rice. It was surprisingly hard to find plain wild rice at the store. There were plenty of rice mixes that contained it, but only one store in town could sell us a bag of standalone wild rice.

My puffed wild rice tasted burnt. I threw it out and tried again, watching the pan a lot more carefully. But I got more burnt (yet puffy) wild rice. After two failures, I figured that I needed a better tutorial than a few recipe sentences. But when I looked online, everyone's Instagram-worthy pictures showed rice that was just as burnt as mine was. Maybe everyone has been burning their wild rice and trying to convince themselves that it has a "deliciously nutty flavor" as the recipe headnote claims.

Since my burnt rice looked just like everyone else's, I gamely put it into the spice grinder. After it was as pulverized as it would get, it had a lot of unnerving translucent crystals that looked like Plexiglas sawdust.

With a skeptical yet open mind, I tried some of our allegedly completed "wild rice crunch." It was like eating gravelly dirt. This stuff threatened to sand off my teeth. At this point, I went off-recipe and tried putting it in hot water to soften it-- you know, what people normally do with rice. I thought I could put a dab of the resulting paste into the bottom of each mushroom for that, um, earthy flavor. But the rice was just as gritty as ever. Since I don't like ending every meal with a visit to the dentist, I threw it out. 

Setting aside the failed wild rice, it was time to go nuts.

We're supposed to use pecans, but this isn't the most economical time of the year to purchase them. Instead, I helped myself to a quarter-cup of cashews from the household snack stash. I could have chopped them with a knife, but we already had the spice grinder out from our recent wild rice misadventures.

I mixed the nuts with the melted butter as directed. If the wild rice hadn't been so terrible after getting burnt and pulverized, it would have been here also. But even though the paste looks bad, it tasted really good. I could already tell it would be an amazing topping for what was to come.

The next part of the recipe involved the white parts of our green onions and a lot of butter. I don't usually cook green onions, so this felt a bit odd. But it smelled really good. We should have been using a leek, but those were very expensive and only sold in large bunches. I didn't want to commit to two pounds of leeks for the sake of one mushroom recipe.

We are next directed to add the chopped mushroom stems. I like that the recipe uses the whole mushroom instead of telling us to snap off the stems and then discard them.

I usually don't cook mushrooms until dry, but I followed the directions and kept stirring the frying pan until all of the juices had bubbled away. The mushroom reduction in the pan was fantastically good, but I don't know if it was worth it.

The next part of the recipe is easy if you can make a competent white sauce (which, admittedly, is tricky to get right on the first five attempts). After we have made gravy of the pan, it was time to add the cheese. The ingredients list calls for "old cheddar," but I chose to use up the various scraps of cheese lurking in the refrigerator. Besides, "five-cheese sauce" sounds so much better than "cheddar sauce."

 

One taste of the cheese sauce and I forgave the recipe writers for the burnt wild rice.

And so, it was finally time to assemble everything! The recipe calls for large portobello mushrooms, but full-sized ones were extremely costly compared to the little ones. I know nothing about fungiculture, but the price difference suggests that mushrooms are difficult to grow to a large size. So, I figured we would have dainty little stuffed mushrooms instead of big ones. And they looked so cute before we baked them.

I know that this magazine is meant for autumn recipes, but realistically we can only serve these on Halloween. They look like we should call them "zombie pustules."

Things didn't look any better after coming out of the oven.

Before I get too disappointed about their appearance, I should note that the magazine's army of photoshoot professionals couldn't make their mushrooms look any less oozy. Their picture is a lot prettier than what happened in our kitchen, but I think this is an inherently untidy recipe.

Food and Drink Autumn 2016, Liquor Control Board of Ontario

Even though our mushrooms looked like I had dropped them onto the floor before serving, I figured there was no way mushrooms and cheese could possibly taste bad. On a related note, I wonder if there's a visual equivalent of an "acquired taste." You know, how you think something looks ugly until spend several years forcefully convincing yourself that you like it.

These were as delicious as they weren't pretty. I know the recipe calls for pecans on top, but I thought the cashews were a lot better. That salty hit on top of the cheese made the mushrooms taste like really good bar food, without having to pay $20 for a beer in some place where the music is as loud as a high school dance. 

And so, once again, a recipe from this magazine didn't go where the directions told us to, but took us somewhere delicious. These mushrooms don't make up for the horror show that currently passes for national politics. But on the (very small) bright side, our northern neighbors who gave us the recipe aren't pretending any of this is normal.

*In the purest, most pedantic sense, it is true that the kilogram is a unit of mass, not a unit of weight. However, unless someone has decided to whip up some stuffed mushrooms while in a vomit comet or somewhere far away from Earth's surface, mass and weight are functionally interchangeable in the kitchen. Anyone wishing to waggle their irate index finger at me is advised to direct their corrective urges at the manufacturers of kitchen scales that switch between pounds (a unit of weight) and kilograms (a unit of mass) at the press of a button.↪

Italian Delight (featuring canned corn)

I was going to talk about how there's no way this could possibly be Italian. But the last time I did that, someone in the comments pointed out that the recipe in question was actually a pretty faithful copy of an actual recipe from Italy.

Italian Delight 8 oz shell macaroni 1 pound ground beef ¼ cup olive oil 1 large onion, finely chopped 1 clove garlic, pressed or finely chopped 1 green bell pepper, finely chopped 1 12-oz can tomato paste 1 16-oz can of corn, drained 16 oz fresh sliced mushrooms 1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce ½ cup (or more) grated cheese (use a cheese that melts well) Cook the beef in a large frying pan. Then remove it from the pan, drain it, and set aside. Add the onion, garlic, bell pepper, mushrooms, and olive oil to the hot pan. Cook until the mushrooms are done. Then stir in the tomato paste, corn, and Worcestershire sauce. Add salt and pepper to taste. Stir in the meat, cover, and simmer. While the sauce is simmering, heat oven to 350° and cook the pasta in salted water. Drain the pasta and mix it with the sauce. Pour into a large casserole coated with cooking spray. Top with cheese and bake about 20 minutes. Mrs. Anna D. Wendt; 233 North Street, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Philadelphia Inquirer Recipe Exchange; 16 August 1935; page 8

The Philadelphia Inquirer Recipe Exchange, 16 August 1935, page 8

I'm fond of recipes from before people started worrying about "authenticity." Italian food crossed the Atlantic, got filtered through the grocery stores that didn't have half the ingredients, made its way to areas where no Italian-American person ever trod, and gave us recipes like this. It starts out with an all-American mound of beef.

So many older recipes with browning beef. If you had no idea what to cook on any given night, you only needed to put hamburger in a frying pan and then see where the contents of your refrigerator took you.

Mrs. Anna D. Wendt directs us to use a half-cup of olive oil-- which is a lot of oil for a single pan of food. 

The Philadelphia Inquirer Recipe Exchange printed the submitter's address right after their name. (This will be relevant to the cooking oil very soon.) I'm always curious to see what sort of house begat any given recipe.  And so, as I can never resist doing, I looked up Mrs. Wendt's house on Google Street View. Mrs. Wendt's neighborhood is near the river that runs through town. Ignoring the appalling real estate prices of today, it looks like it was initially home to people who worked in the various warehouses and commercial docks on the water. 

This brings us to the excessive amount of oil that starts the recipe. Since I don't need to come up with enough calories to sustain a family working laborious jobs, I cut the oil in half. It still made a respectable slick in the pan.

Because I love modern conveniences as much as anyone else, I used frozen bell peppers and frozen onions. I could have properly weighed them out, but instead I eyeballed what looked like one onion and one bell pepper's worth of frozen vegetable confetti.

Our next ingredient caused problems: canned mushrooms. I usually like to follow recipes as written. After all, why bother with someone else's instructions if you intend to ignore them and cook as you always do? Also, as I have often said, following a recipe as written means I can blame someone else when things go bad. But I refused to ruin beef with canned mushrooms. They are bitter, slimy, and revolting. I try to keep an open mind and try things before I don't like them, but I refuse to touch canned mushrooms.

Things were looking good so far. The vegetables had exuded a lot of flavorful juices as they cooked- almost enough to turn this into a vegetable soup. It may look like I added water, but everything in the pan came from the vegetables cooked in it. 

I forgot to purchase fresh garlic, so I had to cheat a bit and use powdered garlic instead. When I stirred it in, the skillet exhaled the scent of the best garlic bread I can imagine.

And now we get to the tomatoes. You may think that spaghetti sauce made with canned tomato paste sounds (to put it delicately) inauthentic. But is canned paste really any worse than the pasty-pink out-of-season tomatoes you can purchase these days?

The taste of the sauce reminded me of the lasagna an ex-roommate's mom dropped off when we were in college. You could tell upon the first taste that it had been lovingly assembled from canned tomatoes with cheddar cheese on top. And while it was as "inauthentic" as you can expect such a creation to be, it really hit the spot after getting all our posessions up three flights of stairs.

 

At this point, we were ready to get out the most expensive part of this recipe: the beef. It was surprisingly hard to see after stirring it into the rest of our Mediterranean fantasy.

We were now one ingredient short of completing our Italian delight. Mrs. Wendt calls for a can of corn or peas. I choose to pretend she never mentioned canned peas. As the can of corn hovered over the pan of beef and tomatoes, I faltered. I tried to tell myself that corned spaghetti would be perfectly fine, if less than ideal. I told myself that this recipe, corn and all, got printed in the newspaper and won a $2 basket of groceries. I told myself that polenta is really commonplace in Italy, so corn is not an alien vegetable to them,and therefore this recipe is more plausible than it seems. I also told myself that this Italian delight came from someone's house, and not some corporate test kitchen trying to shove their products into as many recipes as possible.

Ultimately, I couldn't tip out the corn. It definitely didn't help that most stories about "my awful mother-in-law sabotaged my cooking" seem to involve somebody sneaking into the host's kitchen and ruining the homemade spaghetti sauce (it's almost always spaghetti sauce) with something from a can. 

I didn't think Mrs. Wendt was maliciously sabotaging everyone clipping dinner ideas from this week's Recipe Exchange, but I couldn't ignore the similarity. Maybe she actually liked canned corn on her spaghetti. Or, she may have simply added corn to nearly everything she made, and subjected her Italian delight to the same treatment. Or, maybe she was using canned corn to "volumize" the recipe (as my mother puts it). After all, there was a Depression on and she probably had a lot of kids and a husband to feed.

 

Even though I couldn't bring myself to add a can of corn to a massive vat of spaghetti sauce, I wanted to know if it was any good. And so, I removed some of the pan's contents and added the unbelievable ingredient. The corn kernels, with their bright yellow color, looked horribly out of place. It was like the Italian delight had suddenly sprouted yellow warning lights.

If Mrs. Wendt was "volumizing" the spaghetti with canned corn, she must have had a very large family at home. The Italian delight nearly overflowed the skillet. And keep in mind that I have removed about a quarter of the delight so that I could put corn in a test sample of it.

I thought that Mrs. Wendt had skimped on the cheese, but then again there was a Depression on.

As the cheese melted, it dripped into the pits and crevices all over the the top of the Italian delight, unveiling the corn that it had halfheartedly hidden before baking. I think the corn made it look like a sort of beef-noodle casserole instead of a pasta bake. To Mrs. Wendt's credit, she never said this was a pasta bake but an "Italian delight."

The Italian delight with, um, "corned beef" was surprisingly good. You just had to reframe your mind. It isn't the baked pasta we would make today. It's more like more like a beef-tomato casserole with macaroni in it. Honestly, I would have gone ahead and added chopped celery with the canned corn.

It's easy to forget that even simple things like baked pasta can change a lot in 90 years. I was really thrown off because this was similar to something we'd make today. When I make something so old it's archaic (such as mincemeat with raisins and kidneys), it's easy to act like I'm trying foods from a country I've never been to. But I wasn't prepared for the food to be so similar to modern-day dishes, yet unignorably different. 

But for those who can't countenance corn in spaghetti, here is a plate of the corn-free Italian delight.

The corned spaghetti was good enough that I would have kept the leftovers even if they didn't contain a lot of beef. Like a lot of things we've made from the Recipe Exchange, it's not fancy but it's something you'd love to come home to. In a weird way, the remaining pan of "normal" corn-free Italian delight tasted like something was missing. Or maybe I'm daft-- or both. Either way, after nixing the canned mushrooms, this recipe was a delight.

Herbed Spaghetti: or, This is why we are all obsessed with pasta

Sometimes, the best things are simple and buttery.

Herbed Spaghetti 1 pound thin spaghetti 4 to 6 cloves garlic, pressed or finely minced 3 tbsp olive oil ½ cup butter, melted 1 cup fresh herbs, chopped (chives, parsley, dill, green onion tops) Salt to taste Cook the spaghetti in salted water until done. While the spaghetti is cooking, saute the garlic in the oil until golden. Remove from heat. Add butter, herbs, and salt. After draining the spaghetti, toss it with the herbs. Serve immediately. Serves 6.     Herbed Pasta with Mushrooms: Quarter all ingredient amounts. Instead of spaghetti, use pasta shells, corkscrews, or any other noodle shape that is suitable for mixing with chunky things. (With spaghetti or any other string-type pasta, the mushrooms will never quite mix in.) Saute the garlic in the olive oil (just like the original recipe). After the garlic is golden, add 8 oz of sliced mushrooms to the frying pan. Saute the mushrooms until done. Then slowly add about 2 tablespoons of flour to thicken the pan juices, stirring very fast to prevent lumps. Stir in the butter and herbs. When the butter is melted and all is mixed, remove from heat. Mix with the hot, drained noodles and serve immediately. Note: If you're not serving the spaghetti directly out of the pot, put it in the serving bowl before adding the herbs. That way, none of the herbs cling to the pot and get left behind. Source: The Cotton Country Collection; Junior League of Monroe, Louisiana; 1972

The Cotton Country Collection; Junior League of Monroe, Louisiana; 1972

This recipe appears in a community cookbook with no one's name underneath it. I find the unsigned recipes in compilation cookbooks the most interesting. Why would anyone send a recipe and not want credit for it? Or do anonymous recipes happen when the Cookbook Committee feel like something should not be omitted from the book, even if no one sent it in? Perhaps someone in a Committee (always capitalized) meeting said something like "No one sent in herbed spaghetti? That shows up at every summer social!" and wrote the ingredient list out on the spot.

At any rate, this seemed like as good a time as any to try out this knife I got for Christmas. Its premise of operation looked intriguing, although the eagle on the handle is a bit much for me. I don't like my kitchenware to look like it's headed to a political rally.

Questionable iconography aside, I was a bit leery of the wooden cutting board that came with it. It seemed like it would not do well with my "shove everything in the dishwasher" approach to kitchen management.

I was going to cut up the herbs in small batches. Then I decided that the best way to test this thing was to overload it. Realistically, I need to know how well a kitchen device holds up to moderate-to-severe misuse before deciding whether it should permanently move into the kitchen. And so, I crammed all the green stuff into the bowl that came with this thing. It looked unexpectedly photogenic.

The bowl may not appear overloaded, but that's because the knife is weighing the herbs down.

I was pleasantly surprised at how well this thing worked. In a surprisingly short time, it reduced all our lovely fresh herbs to green confetti. It was like using a food processor without having to clean all the plastic parts later.So while this isn't something I can't live without, I won't rush to re-gift it either.

Countertop toys aside, here is where we get to the real fun of the recipe: adding enough garlic to weed out unworthy men. (As I mentioned in an earlier post, I think garlic bread is a relationship test.) You should know two things. One, I put in exactly as much garlic as the recipe calls for, and no more. Two, I quartered the entire recipe- garlic included. My eyes literally watered (that is not a complaint) while I stirred this.

The rest of the recipe is agreeably straightforward. We are supposed to melt the butter before we stir it in, which makes sense if you're not quartering the recipe. By the time you've melted an entire Junior League's worth of butter, the garlic already in your pan will have burnt. But  after quartering the recipe, I figured this small piece of butter could melt in the pan quickly enough. For those making the recipe in its original amounts, a whole stick of butter may seem excessive and also stereotypically southern. But keep in mind that said butter is going onto an entire pound of spaghetti. (It's still a lot of butter, though.)

Lastly, we add in the herbs. I noted that the recipe has you adding them at the absolute very end of the recipe. I guess our greens would go black and slimy if they cooked in the butter for more than a few seconds. The main thing to note is that ever since weed got upscaled to cannabis, I can never look at a pan of green stuff in oil the same again.

Our herbs shrank a lot in their short time in a hot pan. I wasn't expecting them to be reduced to such a small pile on top of the noodles.

Reminder: this green pile started out as enough herbs to fill a medium-sized salad bowl.

After stirring our herbed spaghetti together, it looked like I thought it would when I first decided to make it. It also smelled every bit as wonderful as I hoped.

I wasn't expecting to like dill in this, but I put it in anyways because someone (again, the recipe has no one's name under it) thought it was good enough to add here. Also, I've only ever encountered dill in pickles, and was curious to see what happens when dill gets separated from cucumbers. It was really good here, and I would definitely add it when making this again.

In short, this recipe is as good as it is simple. It's one of those recipes that seems too easy to bother writing down, just like few people need to consult instructions when making cinnamon toast. But I hadn't thought of making spaghetti with fresh dill and would never have done it had I not seen this written down.

Since I had a lot of extra dill and parsley in the refrigerator, I made herbed spaghetti again as soon as the garlic smell from the last batch got out of the house-- which took an unexpectedly long time. A house is never drafty when you need it to be. 

I couldn't help thinking that the recipe would be fantastic with few mushrooms in it. Because it's almost impossible to stir large things like sliced mushrooms into spaghetti (they always separate out and end up in a pile at the bottom of the pot), I used pasta shells instead. That way, everything would mix together.

And so, after the garlic had become a golden brown but before adding the herbs, we filled the frying pan with fungus. This led to a problem I should have seen coming: the mushrooms exuded a lot of juice. I didn't want to drain it off and throw it out (in part because I'd be pouring away the precious roasted garlic with the mushroom fluid). But I didn't want a puddle of mushroom-water at the bottom of an otherwise exquisite plate of pasta. 

And so, muttering to myself that no Italians were watching anyway, I stirred in enough flour to turn our mushroom water into a sauce that would stick to the noodles. I should note that the mushroom gravy tasted even better than I anticipated because it drew out the flavor of the garlic the entire time the mushrooms cooked. I hadn't even added our herbs yet, and this was already turning into something divine. The rest of the recipe was just as easy as last time: dump the herbs into the pan, pour everything onto the noodles, and serve. 

It's the best pasta I've had in ages. I cannot recommend it enough. Obviously, the herbs are open to variation.  But I strongly suggest trying fresh dill among the greens you choose.