To start, I put some pasta water on the stove to boil. Although I had some penne on hand, I decided to use some of these beautiful dry orecchiette pasta that I picked up at Savenor's earlier in the week. I find orecchiette so adorable in their resemblance of small ears and hope to someday learn to make them myself!
While my pasta was cooking, I prepared the other ingredients. Bret helped me out by shucking some fava beans from their pods. We had about half a dozen pods on hand but it didn't yield a lot of fava beans. I'll definitely have to grab more the next time I make this dish.
I also washed and halved about half a carton of large cherry tomatoes.
And I also cubed some leftover feta cheese from my watermelon and feta bites that I made this past weekend.
When the pasta was done cooking, I drained it and gave it a quick rinse in cold water. I put the fava beans in the already boiling pasta water. The fava beans took only a few minutes to cook and I also gave them a quick rinse when they were done.
I put all the ingredients in a large bowl along with the final (and perhaps most important) ingredient - homemade pesto. I made the pesto the previous weekend since I had a lot of leftover basil. I made a simple pesto with basil, walnuts, parmesan cheese, olive oil, salt and pepper.
The pesto orecchiette salad mad a perfect side dish to my pan-seared chicken breast (marinated in soy sauce, vegetable oil and Mongolian ginger BBQ rub) with sauteed greens (broccoli rabe, black beans, onions and red Russian garlic).
I loved all of the fresh flavors in the pesto and feta orecchiette salad and it was absolutely perfect for summer. Best of all, there were lots leftover, which I'm looking forward to nibbling on during the rest of the week.
What kind of food do you crave after a long, stressful day?
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