A pox on you, Martha

I loathe Martha Stewart. Everything about her is perfect, too perfect. All her cooking shows and her made for the masses home decor line at Kmart, it's just revolting. True Story: When I was in ninth grade, a friend and I disguised ourselves as farm animals (she was Chikn, I was Cow) and made a blog specifically devoted to plotting ways to bring Martha Stewart and her dust-free empire crashing down. When she went on trial for the whole lying about her stocks debacle, we had a field day. Also we had some sort of vendetta against sheep for some reason. I'm not lying. Click here to read a bit of it.

Alas, I am not here to showcase my literary brilliance at age 15. I am here to tell you that Martha Stewart has redeemed herself in my eyes. How, you ask? Through a little offshoot of her vast homemaking ways entitled everyday Food Magazine. I love it. I want to sleep with it under my pillow and wake up each morning having learned some mouth-watering new recipie in the night. This monthly supplement of fast, easy recipies using sometimes unheard of ingredients has changed my life. I love to cook but I get tired of making boring stuff. Since it's summer and I have nothing to do, I have been improving my cooking. In the most recent issue of Food, I discovered two delightful dishes that are easy to make and taste awesome. Mom posted a picture of one of them, it's called two-pea pasta with ricotta and tarragon. it makes peas taste awesome!

For all you non-Food subscribers, here's the recipie:

Ingredients

• coarse salt and ground pepper
• 12 oz. gemelli or other short pasta
• 12 oz. sugar snap peas, stem ends removed (and, if necessary, strings)
• 1 pkg. (10 oz) frozen peas
• 2 tblspoons butter
• 2 tblspoons chopped fresh tarragon, plus more for garnish (optional)
• 1 cup part-skim ricotta cheese

Directions

• In a large pot of boiling salted water, cook pasta 3 minutes less than al dente [al dente usually takes between 8 and 10 minutes, and means firm]. Add snap peas; cook 2 mins. Add peas, and cook 1 minute more. Reserve 1/2 cup pasta water; drain pasta and veggies and return to pot.
• Toss pasta and veggies with butter, tarragon, and ricotta, adding a little reserved pasta water as needed to create a thin sauce that coats pasta; season with salt and pepper
• Divide pasta among four serving bowls, and garnish with tarragon, if desired. Serve immediately [seriously, serve immediately or else the ricotta becomes thick and pastey. it will taste the same but the texture is less appealing.]

Personal Notes: I doubled the pasta since I was serving 6 and not 4 but forgot to double anything else so as a result there was not enough sauce to sufficiently coat the noodles and the ricotta flavor was too mild (but adding salt helped). The tarragon, which is an herb that tastes faintly like anise (or licorice), mixes well with the flavor of the sweet snap peas to make it less licorice-y. I'm not a fan of licorice but I loved the flavor in the pasta.

The other deeeelicious food from the same issue is called roasted carrots with honey.

Ingredients

• 1 & 1/2 pound carrots, cut on the diagonal into 2-inch lengths and halved lengthwise if thick
• 1 tblspoon olive oil
• coarse salt and ground pepper
• 1 tblspoon honey

Directions

• Preheat oven to 450 degrees. On a rimmed baking sheet, toss carrots with oil; season with salt and pepper. Roast, tossing once, until tender, 30 to 35 mins. Remove from oven, toss with honey.

Personal Note: I'm a huge carrot fan and this was like turning the carrots into roasted gold. I have never in my life likened a vegetable to a dessert but I enjoyed the sweet flavor so much I passed on the cookies that night and had two helpings. I like the carrots with slightly more crispy burnt ends (they have a more roasty flavor) so I would have baked them longer but no one else in my family likes charred veggies so we stuck with the directions.

So that's my food wisdom for the day. Please cook with joy and abandon and let me know what you think of them. For another slightly hilarious excerpt from the Martha bashing blog, click here and here.