cook: spaghetti with mint-pea pesto (dinner: the playbook challenge)

This week I received a few advanced pages from Jenny Rosenstrach's new book, Dinner: The Playbook, coming out this August.  I'm sure none of you are strangers to Jenny's site, Dinner: A Love Story, or to her first cookbook of the same name.

Anyway, I received a few recipes from the upcoming book and am planning on trying them ALL.  This Spaghetti with Mint-Pea Pesto was the first, and we absolutely loved it.  It was like healthy summer on a plate.  Jon was super quiet after he started eating, then after a while he looked over to me and said, "I think I'm going to stop cooking.  I just realized I'll never make anything as good as you do."  BIG compliment coming from the husband who had to cook 100% of our meals (amazing ones, I might add) for the first 10 months of our marriage because I was terrible at it.

Above is the dish.  It's pretty hard to make pasta with green sauce look appetizing, especially if dinner isn't ready during peak natural light hours.  :)  Just take my word for it that this is delicious, though.  I made it pretty much exactly as she specified:

Ingredients

1 1⁄2 cups frozen peas

1 cup loosely packed fresh mint leaves, washed

3 tablespoons freshly grated parmesan, plus more for serving

juice from 1⁄2 lemon

1/3 to 1⁄2 cup olive oil

salt to taste

1 pound spaghetti 

Instructions
Bring a large pot of water to boil on the stove. Whirl remaining ingredients (except spaghetti) in a food processor. Taste and adjust as you go. (Don’t over process or it will be too emulsified.) Consistency should be somewhere between smooth and chunky guacamole.

Add pasta to the pot and about halfway through cooking it, scoop out about a cup of hot water. Set aside. Drain pasta once cooked. Scrape pea mixture into the empty hot pot, then start drizzling reserved pasta water into the dip, whisking until it has the consistency of a creamy sauce. Toss pasta in sauce and serve with freshly grated parmesan and some torn mint leaves if you’re feeling fancy. 

You can search the hashtag #dinnerplaybook across social media to check out some of the other recipes from Jenny's book being tested this week.