Pantry raid pasta….with sage from the garden!

Sage is one of my absolute favorite herbs. When I created this dish, I was in quite a lazy mood and had no interest in going out to the store. I rummaged through our test kitchen pantry and found some orecchiette, a fun pasta shaped liked ears. I knew I wanted to use sage somehow, especially the variegated variety we have. See here:

Isn’t it gorgeous?!Again, being in my lazy mood, I saw no need to re-invent the wheel. Sage’s classic partner is browned butter and it is also great with nuts.

I toasted some walnuts [we always have a big bag in our dry goods refrigerator (yes-we have such a thing)], then I set them aside.

I added a big hunk of butter to the pan and cooked it until it was light brown and frothy, adding a generous amount of roughly chopped sage mid-way through the browning.

I cooked the pasta, added it to the butter-sage mixture and tossed it all together with the walnuts, some salt and pepper, and a little reserved pasta water.

The result? Rich and delicious pasta that didn’t require a trip to the store!