Pasta Primavera

Primavera means spring. The dish should taste like it.

This is not about pasta with vegetables. It is about vegetables with pasta. The noodles are there to carry the asparagus, the peas, the young zucchini, the snap of a sugar snap pod still warm from the vine. When these things are right, when they come from a farmer who picked them that morning, you do not need to do much.

I learned this at the market in Berkeley decades ago. A farmer handed me a bundle of asparagus so fresh the cut ends were still wet. I barely blanched them, tossed them with hot pasta and olive oil, and understood something I have never forgotten: perfect ingredients need almost nothing done to them. Your job is to get out of the way.

Every meal is a meaningful choice. When you buy those first spring vegetables from someone who grew them, you are voting for a food system that makes sense. The pasta tastes better for it. Connection has a flavor.