Who's Bad? (Scape it up)

In the face of an excess of garlic scapes (thanks CSA!), as well as a bunch of produce that was calling "cook me now or lose me forever", I decided to cut up a bunch of crap and make something with it.
Literally, that was my approach- I stood in front of my open fridge, grabbed the bag from my CSA pickup Saturday (damn! the broccoli was already yellowing), saw some carrots that had to be weeks old, red peppers that didn't make it onto veggie skewers at the bbq, celery, oldish lettuce, lettuce and tomato pre-cut for bbq burger toppings, and an open package of andouille sausage i didn't use up from shrimp-sausage skewers assembly. I turned to my cupboards for garlic and onions that had been up there for too long, and finally on the counter, one huge and one small tomato, red and about to start severely wrinkling.

Fine, dear reader, accuse me of neglect and wastefulness, but I settled on a goal for the evening- use all of this up, by making a pasta sauce and a salad. I started with the onions, garlic and scapes. In total I would say I minced 5 cloves of garlic, thinly sliced 1.5 large onions, and chopped about 5 scapes. I put that into a large, deep frying pan with hot olive oil, and let that cook on medium-high heat until the onions were starting to soften, adding a little salt, pepper, and crushed red pepper to the pan.


In the meantime i rough-chopped the large tomato and the leftover burger-cut tomato, and once the onion-ramp-garlic mixture had cooked about 10 minutes, (I turned the heat down to medium-low for a bit) I threw in the tomatoes, and added some oregano for good measure. I turned the heat back up on the stove, as I wanted the tomatoes to break down and make the softened onion mixture saucier. While this was cooking, I chopped half the red bell pepper into thin half-length slices, and cut 2 links of andouille sausage (the sausage is pre-cooked, so no raw sausage in this recipe, although if you had uncooked sausage, it would work just fine) into pieces. Once the tomato-onion mixture was cooked down some (about 10 minutes, maybe more if you kept the heat down) I threw in the red bell pepper, sausage, and some white wine (keep it saucy!).

Oh, I forgot to tell you- I put the water on to boil once the onions were in the pan and cooking down. I debated over which type of pasta to use, and went with a linguine, more on that later. While the sauce was simmering (I turned the heat down to low) I cut up the rest of the red bell pepper, the oldish lettuce, carrots, celery, and the other small tomato to make a salad. in the meantime I MAY have thrown some more white wine on the sauce. it's possible. I might have dumped the contents of my wine glass into the pan. you never know. I still had some nice feta in the fridge, so I crumbled that over the salad, added some flax seeds, and then made everyone's favorite simple oil-and-vinegar dressing by grinding salt and pepper over the salad, sprinkling a few pinches of cumin, and then adding about 2 tablespoons of olive oil and 1 tablespoon of balsamic vinegar. salad! done!

The pasta was about done boiling, so I added a few spoonfuls of the pasta water into the sauce and stirred that. Then I drained the pasta, put it in a large bowl and poured my impromptu sauce over top. It was delicious. it had a kick from the crushed red pepper and andouille sausage, but was sweet since I had cooked the onions down so much at a lower heat. It wasn't tomato-y per se, but it had a nice base flavor. At first I wasn't a fan of the linguine as my pasta choice, I thought maybe I would have been better served by a ziti or rotelli, but after just a few minutes, the linguine really soaked up the pasta sauce and it was delicious.