Crispy Tortellini

Smitten Kitchen is not one of the blogs I look at daily, though I’ve tried many of her recipes and they’re always amazing, but I was looking for something else earlier this week and saw her Crispy Tortellini recipe and that caught my attention. We had it for lunch today and I believe we’ll be having it again!

First, let me tell you about how inexpensive this meal was to fix. I bought a 2 pound package of tri-colored tortellini at Sam’s Club for $9.98. I divided that up into 4  packages but the original package must have been a bit over 2 pounds because I put 9 oz. in each of my 4 packages. I also bought prosciutto at Sam’s. I think it was 32 oz. but I can’t remember. I paid $10.98 and divided it up into 3 packages so that’s $2.50 for the tortellini and $3.66 for the proscuitto and it was some of the prettiest proscuitto I’ve had in a long time!

That’s $6.16.  The cost of the marscapone was hardly anything . . I paid about $4.50 for a big tub and used about 2 T., and I have no idea how much the parmesan cheese was but this meal cost us less than $8 for sure and we had enough left over that one of us can have it again.

Some of the ingredients came from the garden. The carrots, onions and tomatoes are not included in the original recipe. I pulled out some onions (you can see one in the picture above this one) that had hail damage because I didn’t want them to start rotting in the ground so they have to be used in everything til they’re gone. A damaged onion will begin to rot in no time if left out and since they have holes in them, I don’t want to put them in the fridge and have them smell up the kitchen. If I can’t use them fast enough, I’ll chop them, vacuum seal them and put them in the freezer.

The lemon is a Meyer lemon and not as tart as other lemons so I added a bit of juice from some over ripe key limes that had been knocked off the trees. Maybe I should change the recipe name to “Storm Clean Up Tortellini!”  

The tomatoes came off a vine growing in a pot that was sitting under a tree so the tree had protected it from the hail. No matter what I have growing in pots, if I used compost from the worms, there’s a tomato vine growing in it. I’ve learned my lesson  .. the red wigglers do not get tomatoes!

When I first saw the garden after the storm, there were lots of shelled peas on the ground. I could sea the pea pods still on the vine but opened up with all the peas missing. I thought . . what kind of bug would do that? I wondered if it had been a lizard or some weird grasshopper . . or even Cat. Then I realized the hail had caused the mature pods to pop open and the peas were all knocked onto the ground. The pods that weren’t quite mature were just damaged but the peas inside are ok. I need to get back out into the garden and try to get them all picked before they also rot.

Back to the recipe . . I did a few things differently.

1. As stated, I added carrots, onion and tomatoes. I’m thinking I could also add yellow squash, zucchini, Japanese okra . . whatever would be in the garden.
2. The onion was sliced and caramelized after the proscuitto was browned.
3. Instead of using water as the liquid, I used white wine.
4. When the I added the wine, that’s when I added the onions, raw peas and raw carrots.

I love one dish meals . . especially the yummy ones!