This dish won’t win any healthy recipe awards, but I’m ok with that. Sometimes a rich creamy pasta is called for when the temperature drops. (Guess I’m trying to fatten up for winter or something.)
Blue Cheese Pasta with Pears and Chard
- 6 ounces blue cheese, crumbled
- 1 cup half and half
- 1 medium Asian pear, diced
- 3/4 cup walnuts, chopped
- 3 cups roughly chopped Swiss chard, well-packed
- 1 tablespoon sherry vinegar
- freshly cracked pepper
- sea salt
- 12 ounces small gluten-free pasta (like rotini or penne)
- Bring a large pot of water to boil. Salt and add the noodles.
- Heat a large frying pan over medium heat. Add the half and half. Then add blue cheese. Stir to allow the cheese to melt. Stir in the vinegar. Season generously with pepper. Add the pears and walnuts.
- When the noodles are cooked, add the chard to the noodle pot. Then drain the noodles.
- Stir noodles and chard into the cheese sauce and serve.
Serves 6
If you use red chard, like I did, be gentle when stirring the noodles into the sauce, stir just enough to get the noodles coated. If you keep stirring you’ll end up with pink sauce. (On the other hand maybe you want that, so stir away.)
You can reduce the amount of cheese to lessen the blue cheese flavor (and give your arteries a bit of a break), although really if you have issues with the flavor of blue cheese then perhaps you should just skip this recipe entirely. Or try it with a different cheese and let me know how it goes.
This sounds yummy. I love blue cheese and Iris (my wife) loves nuts and pears. Even better together. Glutten free pasta. Hmm… I suppose I’ll have to give it a try. I hope it’s not as heavy as whole wheat pasta. I’ll run by my health food store and see what they have. I’m headed out for some chard anyway. ;-)
Having never had whole wheat pasta I can’t provide much insight into how it compares to gluten-free pasta. There are numerous types of gluten-free pasta: corn, quinoa, brown rice. You might want to grab a couple and see if you like one more than the others. My only suggestion is that shorter pasta ie: farfalle, fusilli, rotini tend to be easier to cook with. In general gluten-free pasta has a tendency to clump together and it seems to be worse with longer strand noodles like spaghetti.
Thanks, that’s good to know. I didn’t make it to the health food store yesterday, but now I’m armed with a bit more info. Basically, as I take it, gluten free pasta? Keep it short. Gotcha! I love quinoa, so I’ll especially be on the look out for it. I’ll report back when I finally have this meal come together.
just a note on blue cheese,I heard recently that people on a gluten free diet should not eat it! Most of the ‘blue’ is started with bread mould,so therefore not gluten free!
I have heard that some blue cheeses are not gluten-free due to the fact that the mold is grown on bread. However, as this article mentions many commercial blue cheese manufacturers no longer use bread to culture the mold. The article also discusses a study done by the Canadian Celiac Association, in which blue cheeses that included mold derived from bread were tested for gluten. It was found that those cheeses contained no detectable gluten. (Links to the study are provided.)
Basically, it sounds like the advice regarding blue cheese is the same advice that applies to most processed foods–check the label. This forum post at Celiac.com includes a list of blue cheese that were verified gluten-free as of March of last year.