This summer, Cookthink’s been really lucky to have two excellent interns from Smith College. Corinne and Sam have been busy researching, entering and (mostly) analyzing recipes for us to publish on Cookthink. We’ll post a proper introduction soon, but I wanted to mention one exciting side effect of having them come a couple of times a week.

Since Brys does most of Cookthink’s recipe testing and photography down in DC, I don’t end up doing a whole lot of cooking during the day. When I do, it’s usually fast, haphazard and for one. And even though Elizabeth and I use Cookthink.com to come up with some ideas about what to cook for dinner every night, we don’t do much in the way of recipe development. Occasionally, when we need a second or third look at a particular recipe, we’ll give it a test up here. But generally, we approach the site as users.

Anyway, one of the great, unintended consequences of having Corinne and Sam here during the day is that we tend to take a very Cookthink-ish approach to our lunches. Though I’ve tried a few times to plan for their being here, we’ve mostly winged it with whatever we happen to have in the kitchen. (They’ve eaten a lot of scapes.) We’ve made braised chicken breasts, frittatas, salads, sandwiches and pastas, the best of which came last Thursday.

Our neighbor Becky was heading off to Vermont for a few weeks to play bassoon with a traveling symphony. Before she left, she stopped off with a bag of fresh green peas she’d just picked from another neighbor’s garden. (She also brought homemade strawberry jam.) Those peas were pretty much all we had in the way of vegetables. We decided to keep it simple, but as Corinne and Sam got to shelling, I found a few strips of bacon, a chunk of parmesan and a little bag of raw almonds.

We threw a few cloves of garlic into the pasta water and as the pasta boiled, we cooked the bacon and then let it drain while we fried the almonds in the bacon grease. We drained the pasta so that a quarter cup of so of the water was still in the pot and then mixed everything together for a minute over high heat so that some of the peas were warm while others were still crisp and raw. A little olive oil, a little lemon juice, a little black pepper.

I’m not sure it merits a recipe, but I definitely want to make it again.

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