Engineer Food: Cold Pasta with Lemon Sauce

The meal du jour is a lunch special: a cold pasta with butter, lemon juice and tomatoes.

The first thing to do is put water on to boil. I won't insult your intelligence by giving step to step pictures and instructions on how to fill the pot with about twice the volume of your dried pasta, add a pinch of salt and put the pot on high. I really don't need to do that.

Do I?

While waiting for the water to come to a boil, you can use the time to meditate on the transient nature of life. Or you can chop up your tomato.

Why, yes, I do use a lot of tomatoes. Because they are delicious.

Dice the tomato. I did a very rough chop (the pieces shown below range from about a quarter to three-quarters of an inch). Chopping them smaller will give the end dish a more homogeneous texture. It is up to you how you would like it.

I, personally, hate homogeneity.

At last, the water has come to a boil! Dump in your pasta. Shown here is a half pound of bowties because that was what I had in. You can also use fusilli or spiralle, any pasta that is small and dense.

Mmmm...raw pasta is delicious

While that is cooking, it is time to tackle the dressing. In a small sauce pot, melt about a quarter stick of butter. The best way to do this is to have the burner on medium low. If it is hotter, the butter will, of course, melt faster, but you have to be on guard for burning.

It's melty.

Add to that a few squeezes of lemon juice and set that to low for the rest of the cooking of the pasta. If it begins to really boil, turn off the heat immediately.

Now the pasta is cooked, it needs to be strained and chilled. If you are not in a hurry, you can let the pasta cool in the fridge. Or you can dump ice into the strainer. That works too.