We realize that not everyone likes blue cheese, because it’s a variety that can be funky and stinky and, really, you’re eating mold (of a variety that’s a cousin to penicillin, in fact). Nevertheless, if you’re a fan, or you just really want to give blue cheese an honest try, we recommend this pasta dish we recently came across in a recipe from the New York Times. It’s made with roasted cauliflower and other veggies and finished off with a blue cheese sauce, which goes well with all the different components. We adapted this recipe on one of those last snowy days of the winter, and it was a deliciously hearty pasta dish to warm us up when we were stuck inside.
To make this, you’ll need:
- A head of caulilflower
- A leek
- Garlic
- 8 ounces of pasta
- Butter
- 6-8 ounces of blue cheese
- Thyme
- Chives
First, chop your cauliflower into florets and mix them with 1/4 cup of olive oil and a generous sprinkling of salt and pepper. Spread the cauliflower out on a baking sheet and roasted it at 425°F for 20 minutes.
While that’s in the oven, thinly slice the green parts of your leek and two garlic cloves and sprinkle them with a small handful of thyme leaves.
Add these to the baking sheet and roast everything – including the cauliflower – for another 20 minutes, flipping all the veggies over halfway through.
Meanwhile, cook your pasta, and also crumble up all your cheese.
Once the vegetables come out of the oven …
… mix them with the pasta, the cheese, and 3 tablespoons of butter. Stir everything together until the cheese is mostly, but not all the way, melted.
And serve your pasta with some chopped chives and more thyme leaves on top.
Not too hard, right? There’s some prep work involved, what with chopping up the vegetables and crumbling of a whole block of cheese, but after that all you have to do is roast, boil, and mix. The cheese melts well with butter to make a creamy sauce that pairs nicely with the veggies, which come out of the oven all tasty and caramelized. And you can use as mild or wild a blue cheese as you want, depending on what level of flavor you want. This is an unusual pasta dish, with some ingredients you might not usually see together, but we thought it came out really well, and we’d eat it again any time.