Lasagnette with cannellini, water chestnut & dried scallop

When my mother-in-law was a little girl, her parents, both Italians, cooked beans if not every day would be every other day, in soup or in pasta. Those days they hardly afforded meat so beans became the main source of protein in their diet. Putting beans in pasta is a double-up of starch, I know it probably sounds odd to most of us. But after first tried I actually look forward to it now.

Lasagnette is flat noodle cut out from lasagna sheet. You don't need to be fancy like me to make it from scratch. These home-made colored noodles I made sometimes ago had been in my freeze for too long, now it's time to get rid of them. There's no sauce but only "seasoned" oil to flavor the whole dish, so I looked for something salty with a taste of ocean. Dried scallop (found at Asian food store) tastes much more intense than the fresh one, anchovy would be a nice substitute I think. With water chestnut for some crunch, and cannellini for nourishment, this dish is totally satisfactory to me.

Recipe (yield: one-bowl meal for myself)

• lasagnette or any flat noodle
• 1/3 cup cooked cannellini (mine were saved from making minestrone soup the other day)
• 3 water chestnut, diced
• 9 small dried scallops
• 2 big cloves of garlic, finely diced
• a pinch of red chili pepper flakes
• 1 Tbp lemon juice
• olive oil
• salt & pepper to taste
• parsley

Direction:

• Rinse the dried scallops, soak them in a small bowl of hot water for an hour... save the water.
• Please plan ahead... cooking fresh pasta only take 3 minutes or so, and the saute will take 3 minutes, I want them to be done at the same time. Anyway, bring a big pot of water to boil (time to start saute), add salt and pasta, cook unit the noodles are almost done as they will be cooked a bit more in a frying pan.
• In a skillet, drizzle a generous amount of olive oil, saute the garlic, red chili pepper and scallops over low heat for 1 - 2 minutes, raise up the heat, add cannellini, salt to taste, toss for another minute. Add in drained pasta and the scallop water if the noodles look too dry, toss. Last minute add water chestnut and lemon juice, salt and pepper to taste. Drizzle more extra virgin olive oil to serve, garnish with parsley.

I'd like to contribute this recipe to Presto Pasta Night, the event is created by Ruth at Once Upon A Feast. Please head over to her site on this Friday for the round-up.

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