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I'm Gianni. And this is my North Beach. I'm making pasta primavera. I got lucky down
at the farmer's market. I got the absolute best spring vegetables for this dish, originally
done in the 70s at Le Cirque in New York. So here's what I'm using.
Some early spring peas. Some asparagus.
Fresh fava beans. Early spring onions.
Some garlic. Some cherry tomatoes.
Basil. Just a little bit of cream.
Ricotta salata. Probably a little sprinkle of extra-***
olive oil, too. You're gonna love this one.
These were the early spring vegetables at the farmer's market.
Around the country, around the world, people are gonna have different vegetables. You can
pick your own. I'd suggest you only take 3 of your favorites.
Here, I'm using the peas and the asparagus and the fava beans.
But pick any 3 you like, whatever's fresh and local in the market.
And if you come up with a new combination, send it to hashtag giannisurprise. I'd love
to see how your dish turned out. So here's some of those nice asparagus. Look
how thin they are. If you just break them right down at the bottom,
they'll break all by themselves. And I like to remind you any time you have
scraps of vegetables like this, save them, put them in your next broth.
And then fava beans. So they come in these kinda ugly looking pods.
So what you have to do is just break that open and these fava beans will pop out.
And blanch these in boiling water, in hot water, just for maybe about a minute. You'll
notice the skin will blister and you'll be able to get the fava bean out.
So here's one that I already blanched. See how it's a little bit wrinkled there?
Just open the top with your nail and push it out.
If you get little ones like this, the shell is gonna be tender, so I don't even bother
taking those out. I'll just put them in that way.
Look how nice those are. Nice and fat. This size I may only need one.
So I'm just gonna slice these and chop them a little bit.
These pieces over here I'm gonna cut in half. And the beard I'll save this for next Halloween.
Then we got some garlic. Baboom. Get rid of the paper.
And I got a second one here. I'm gonna do a whole box of farfalle--that's
the pasta I'm gonna use--so I think I'm gonna need a couple of these garlics to get good
flavor. And then I'm just gonna rough chop these,
the garlic. You know what? Even though these are fat,
I'm gonna go for a second one. I've got cherry tomatoes here. These are go
in a little later and all's I'm gonna do is cut 10 of those in half.
I'm turning my flame on high so I can heat this pan up.
I'm gonna add extra *** olive oil. Even though the oil's not hot, I'm gonna add
my garlic and let that come up to temp. As soon as I see this starting to heat up
a little bit, I'm gonna begin adding my other vegetables.
This is my green onion, my spring onion. Give them a little sprinkle of salt.
While the garlic and onion are cooking in the oil, I'm just gonna cut this on the bias
and add them to the pan also. So I just want the asparagus to pick up a
little brighter green color in the hot oil. The fava beans the same way.
Some more olive oil is in order. I'm gonna take some of my pasta cooking water
and add it to the pan and put this top back on here.
Let me give some salt to the water here for the farfalle.
When you first put them in, give them a good stir to make sure nothing sticks to the bottom
of the pan. Now I'm gonna add the tomatoes and the peas.
Mix this all in. I may add just a little bit more of the pasta
water because this is gonna cook for another few minutes and some of this water is gonna
evaporate. The other thing about using pasta water is
that as the pasta's cooking, it's letting off starch. So that's gonna help thicken the
sauce also. Turn it up a little bit, bring it back to
a rapid simmer. So I'm just testing here and the asparagus
is fork tender. Maybe two teaspoons of heavy cream.
Mix this in. Let this all come together a little bit.
Look at all these pretty colors. The gold of the olive oil, the cream, the
green vegetables, the little cherry tomatoes...I'm getting excited now!
Put it right in here and let it finish cooking right in the sauce.
So the pasta was very al dente when I took it out and the pasta's absorbing all the vegetable
broth and cream. As this finishes cooking, I'm just gonna put
some fresh basil around. Rip some of these bigger leaves in here.
Okay, I can smell the basil already coming off the pan.
Let me plate some of this up and we're gonna eat!
Here's farfalle primavera. Looks delicious. I'm just gonna finish it up a little bit here...drizzle
a good finishing olive oil...never hurt nothing. Just a little bit.
Black pepper on this. And then here's that ricotta salata.
If you don't have this, you could use parmagiana, you can use pecorino.
I know I want some peas, I want some asparagus, I want some tomato.
Spring time in the city. What am I making?
(off camera) pasta primavera Pasta primavera. (laughing)
That's pretty good. I like it.