Farmer's Market Pasta

Hubs and I are no longer Farmer's Market virgins!

Unfortunately there are no Farmer's Markets in our area but we spent a night in Austin this past weekend to celebrate our anniversary and there ARE Farmer's Markets in Austin. So we decided to check it out!

I didn't take any photos at the market, which I'm seriously regretting now, but we LOVED it! We got tons of fresh vegetables, free range eggs, grass-fed beef, and this...

In case you can't read the label, that would be fresh Arugula-Black Pepper Pappardelle pasta!!!!

I was really excited about this purchase, if you can't tell from all the exclamation marks. :)

I just wasn't sure what to do with it that would do it justice. I wanted the pasta's flavor to shine and not be masked by a ton of sauce.

Not marinara...too flavorful. Not cream sauce...too heavy. Hmmm....

Then browned butter sauce popped into my mind. Light (well as light as butter can be...hehe), not too heavy, mild....PERFECT!

So I googled "brown butter pasta" and found this recipe for Penne with Vegetables and Browned Butted Sauce from a newspaper article and it looked exactly like what I was wanting.

All we did to tweak it was add some chunks of chicken to the mix to make it a bit more "substantial" (aka to get my husband to eat it).

Oh and added some grated parmesan to the top because cheese makes everything better.

Good news: The hubs gave it two huge thumbs up! I was a little concerned about how he would like it and I think he actually was too, but he LOVED it!

Trying this fresh pasta also made us realize how much we really need to bust out our Kitchenaid pasta maker attachment soon and make our own pasta. Fresh pasta is SO much better than dried!! So keep an eye out for future pasta making adventures.