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Fresh Tortellini with Asparagus, Peas and Mint

Fresh Tortellini with Asparagus, Peas and Mint
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         Alright, I am aware that many readers have come to believe we simply do not eat any meal that does not feature asparagus.  And to look at our most recent posts, you wouldn’t be that far off.  We just love the vegetable at this time of the year.  And we do live in a place where some of the country’s best asparagus grows.  So we take advantage of our geography and eat a lot of the stuff this time of year.

        But we can hardly keep up with the 10 recipes in the current issue of Fine Cooking magazine.  And to make that challenge even harder, the magazine says they all come to the table in 10 minutes.  The recipe for Fresh Tortellini came at a particularly good time since we were entertaining our friend Stephen on a weeknight and Stephen is a strict vegetarian.

         Tortellini was one of my son Alex’s favorite foods when he was little.  Come to think of it, it was one of my favorite things to serve him.  They’re terribly easy to cook and, unlike a lot of pastas, very forgiving in their cooking times.   They’re also easy to find fresh in the supermarket and lend themselves to a lot of creative sauce-making—cream sauce, tomato sauce, pink vodka sauce for example.  In this recipe, there’s no real sauce, per se, but the addition of 5 ounces of Boursin Cheese perks up the dish and melds it all together. (The original recipe in Fine Cooking called for 2 ounces of goat cheese.  But goat cheese is one of the things that’s off the menu at our house. Andrew just doesn’t like it.)  And when Fine Cooking said it cooked in 10 minutes, they weren’t kidding.  It’s astonishingly fast.  Even the prep is a piece of cake: Cutting up the asparagus is about as labor-intensive as this dish gets.  The pine nuts need to be toasted and the mint rough chopped but that’s it.  It’s a perfect Meatless Monday meal although when I saw the Tortellini next to my vegetarian version, I couldn’t help thinking that those Tortellini, filled with Cheese and Prosciutto, would have been very good indeed. Here’s the recipe:



2 thoughts on “Fresh Tortellini with Asparagus, Peas and Mint”

  • Will be serving this tonight,thank-you… 'cause have all the ingredients at hand including fresh mint plucked from neighbour's garden. There will be goat cheese in mine, tho'.

  • I think you will really like this. I might have cheated and put a little cream to work with the cheese but both Andrew and our friend Stephen said they did not miss it. And let's face it, it's a little healthier without. XOXO

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