Having spent the past two summers deep in the bowels of Texas, with one of those summers (2011) very nearly the hottest in the history of hell, we have a deep and genuine empathy with our friends around the country who’ve been sweltering this year.
Last summer season (down there) we endured 110 days of 100+ temperatures, with the highest we recorded / saw personally being 116. It was stunningly miserable.
Moving to the Puget Sound lowland country has been almost heaven sent from a weather perspective; 10 days ago it was still raining now and again and temps were struggling to clear 60.
New friends in the area have been talking for months about summer starting around the 4th – and damned if it didn’t. The area has seen high temps pushing 85 or higher (gasp); the locals have been sunburning en mass, sweating for the first time in months and complaining vociferously.
The (relative) heat wave has had us reaching for some of our favorite cool summer pasta salad recipes, including this one – Santa Fe Pasta Salad with Red Chile Pesto.
For the life of me I can’t exactly remember where we dug up this recipe, though I think it was Lucy’s.
Lucy was the far better half of a pair that we met and hung around with back in Salt Lake City years ago; she hailed from Santa Fe and taught us a great deal about the flavors and cooking of the Southwest (an obvious bias of ours). Lucy and her husband were the principals in the ‘great rib war’ we wrote about last summer.
Lucy’s Red Chile Pesto is an absolute must for fans of southwestern cuisine and is fit for much, much than simply pasta – spicing up grilled chicken or halibut for instance. Thank Lucy when you make this one….
Pasta
1 pound fusilli pasta, cooked al dente, rinsed in cold water, drained
1 yellow bell pepper, seeded and cut into thin strips
1 red bell pepper, seeded and cut into thin strips
20 large calamata olives
20 large brine-cured green olivesRed Chile Pesto
5 cloves garlic
1/4 cup pine nuts
1/4 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese
1/2 bunch fresh basil
1/2 bunch fresh cilantro
1/4 cup red chile powder
1/4 cup chile caribe (go easy, heat varies widely)
1 scant tbsp. cumin
Kosher salt to taste
1 and 1/2 cups olive oil
Pasta. While the pasta is cooking, wash and slice the bell peppers. Rinse the pasta in cold water and drain well. Combine the pasta, olives and sliced bell peppers.
Pesto. Dump everything save for the olive oil into your trusty food processor and puree to rough puree. Dribble in the olive oil with the processor running.
Serve with a flourish. If we’re headed to the river with this, everything gets combined ahead of time, which I personally think is best. If we’re serving at home, The Boss likes to serve a big dollop of Red Chile Pesto over the pasta, which has been of course placed artfully over a lettuce leaf.
Enjoy.
