Challenge: Savory Entree with Fruit

Linz: Make a savory entree that features fruit.

Jess: This ended up proving to be quite the tricky dish for me to come up with. When I took some time to think about it, we really have featured a fair amount of fruit in savory dishes. Our friend Jess shared with us how to make blueberry chicken, I made fried quinoa with pineapple, we have experimented with chilled cucumber and apple soup, my favorite salad features strawberries and blueberries in the summer and oranges in the winter. In addition to that we have made multiple appetizers with fruit, including pomegranate, apple brie bites, cranberry salsa, roasted strawberry crostini and apple and smoked mozzarella calzones. And to top it off we’ve tried blueberry pizza, which one may or may not count as a dinner item.

That left me not wanting to make a dish that featured meat (obviously, I’m a vegetarian!), pizza, appetizers, salad or pineapple (that seemed too easy). I was finding very little inspiration with those parameters from Pinterest, internet searches, and google reader (which I am over-the-top sad about the upcoming end of). Then I came across this recipe for Beggar’s Linguine from Dorie Greenspan’s Around My French Table. Bingo!

The selection of fruit is still minimal (I actually made this dish a couple of weeks ago when winter was very much still happening). So this was the perfect way to feature the in season clementine. The recipe vaguely reminded me of one of my go to meals to make: pasta, fresh squeezed lemon juice, Parmesan cheese, parsley and red chili flakes. It’s easy, I likely have all the ingredients on hand and I find it comforting. Definitely felt like it was worth trying this twist on a classic pasta dish.

Plus there is plenty of dried fruit, therefore I feel like it is really featuring more than one fruit. This is really the easiest thing to make. You are just boiling pasta and mixing it with A LOT of butter plus basically trail mix and squeezed orange (or in my case clementine) juice. One blog mentioned this would not work well for leftovers, I scoffed and declared I’ll eat anything for leftovers! While technically I did eat it for leftovers, true story the dish is meant to be eaten in the first sitting.