Not your mom's pesto

All right, so my mom never made pesto. My dad, on the other hand ... he would've made this if my mom weren't the kind of eater who thinks ketchup is on the spicy side. (That is not hyperbole.)

So I came home last week with a small tub of hatch green chile pesto from Whole Foods, optimistic I'd get Mike to make a batch of pasta.

He has officially mastered the art of handmade pasta. We stick with wide, thick strands - a cross between tagliatelle and pappardelle - and he likes to mix things into the dough, much like his employment of rosemary bits or red pepper flakes with raw pizza dough. Tonight, he pulled a bag of mustard greens out of the freezer with only about 1/3 of the greens remaining in the bag - and begging for freezer burn. He minced the hell out of them and mixed them in with the pasta.

I love those green specks from the mustard greens; it looked beautiful tossed with the hatch chile pesto, a splosh of cream and some freshly grated grana padano. It was almost too pretty to eat. Almost.

(We had a simple salad, too, to make me feel less guilty about my third serving of carbs for the day.)

(Okay, four servings.)