Farfalle with Asparagus, Roasted Shallots and Blue Cheese

For my shallots, I followed this recipe from epicurious. I took advantage of the recipe reviews to make a few adjustments. It also seemed like it would make a lot of food so I halved the recipe and it made enough for two servings plus leftovers.

First off, instead of bread crumbs, I toasted about 1/2 cup of pine nuts in my cast iron skillet.

The recipe called for peeling and halving the shallots, which seemed to me to be really big shallot chunks, so I cut them a little smaller. After they cooked down during the roasting, the size was much better.

Many of the reviewers pointed out that you have to really love blue cheese to make this recipe. I love me some blue cheese, but since I was making this for company (does Amy count as company?) I decided to tone down the strong flavor of the Saga Blue that I bought by mixing about 2/3 goat cheese and only 1/3 blue and that worked. It could be ramped up to half blue and half goat, but even I might have been overwhelmed by all blue cheese.

To make the sauce creamier, I set aside a little bit of the pasta water to mix in along with the cheese and also added a little half and half. Toss it all together with plenty of salt and pepper and it was done.


This was a super fast and super easy recipe. Between this and Amy's Mac and Cheese, I can safely say that shallots + cheese + pasta = gooooood.