Thursday, January 3 Capellini with Clam-free Sauce (Vegetarian Times) Rating: 3.75

I want to give a disclaimer here – I made a couple of changes, which probably impacted the final outcome. It probably would have been much better if I’d followed it exactly as written, but well, I used what I had on hand instead. The recipe was part of a vegan feature in the magazine of recipes from several different books, and can be found in The 30 Minute Vegan’s Taste of Europe. I will say this, it really did only take about 30 minutes to make and was very simple – good for a weeknight. Anyway. Seth hates mushrooms and I love them. We are a house divided. I just generally make them for myself when he’s not around for dinner. No big deal. I saw this recipe in the latest Vegetarian Times and decided to try it. I can honestly say I don’t think I’ve ever actually had clam sauce before, so I was basing my opinion that it looked really good solely on the recipe in the magazine. The first thing change I had to make was that the recipe actually is for linguini, which I was out of. So I swapped in capellini, thinking that the fragile pasta would be fine with the light sauce – and it probably would’ve been, but I think my pasta to sauce ratio was off. Less pasta would’ve featured the sauce better. The other thing I did was so to substitute the kombu I had on hand for the arame the recipe asked for. In fairness, I did look it up online first and the interwebs said you could swap, but still. My guess is that the arame would have been more flavorful. The finished recipe wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t great. I made a small salad and a quick vinaigrette (The Mediterranean Vegan Kitchen) for a side, along with a little bit of a baguette and some of the garlic Seth roasted on Monday to smear on it.