Tortellini Primavera

Phil Anderson: Hi! I am Chef Phil Anderson, Harris Teeter's Executive Chef and we are going to make Tortellini Primavera today. We are using 9 ounces of whole wheat tortellini and a bag of organic mixed vegetables in the frozen-oil. One clove of garlic that we have diced up really well. We have taken some baby zucchini and we sliced that. This is a little baby squash and we have quartered those up and that's about two cups. Then, that's about two tablespoons of the chives and then we have taken two cups of chiffonade, this is a arugula and we have half-a-cup of low sodium vegetables stock. And then we are going to half a lemon and used that juice. Okay. We are going to take some olive oil and pan fry all of this and then add our cooked pasta. But first we need to go over there and cook the pasta. So let's do that. Now you want to use a lot of water when you are boiling pasta. We have salted our water and it's about a gallon to every pound. So I have 9 ounces going in here and now you want to stir it, making sure that it doesn't stick to the bottom. Now, we are going to cook this for -- this fresh pasta, so you don't have to cook it for as long as you do for hard pasta, dry pasta. I would say until it got to be al dente and al dente means "firm to the tooth". So you want to have a little bit of chew in there. Personally, I like it all al dente, "firm to the tooth". Okay. So that's going to be about, let's say, 7 or 8 minutes. But we don't know for sure, so we are going to watch it, we are going to stand over it and we are going to nurse it. Okay, we have had it in there for enough time for it to be rocking and rolling, we are going to add our vegetables. There we go and again you want to stir that, make sure it's nice. Now those frozen vegetables, so that won't take too long for them to tie out in this hot water, hot boiling water. So another two minutes and we will drain this pasta off. Okay, so we have drained that on pasta, it's al dente, it's cooked the way we want to cook it. Now we are going to put this over a medium-high heat, little bit of olive oil and then we are going to start off with our garlic and our zucchini, squash. We are going to set tables those up for a little while. You don't want to get that garlic to burn.

You have to start all over, if you burn the garlic, you got to start all over. So we will get oil over all of those, cooked up for a little bit. And then we are going to add the rest of our ingredients. You want to cut your vegetables, if you sauteing, to relatively the same size so they cook evenly. If you have a big squash and a little zucchini then the zucchini is going to get down a lot faster than squash. So uniform cutting. We just want to take the crunch out of these vegetables. We want to still have some texture, but that's why we are cooking them up a little bit here, sauteing them up. Okay. Now we are going to add our chives, that will give it a little bit of the onion flavor. Then we are going to add back in our pasta and mixed vegetables. Okay. And all those pasta, get that mixed evenly, we are going to add in low sodium vegetable stock. We are going to put in our chiffonade of arugula and we are going to squeeze our lemon into it. We are going to lower the heat and we are going to cover just for a couple of minutes. We want the broth to kind of hit the top of the aluminum foil and have it go back into the pasta. We only want to do this for a couple of minutes. Okay, so it's been about two minutes. We are going to turn this off and we are going to go back in here and see what we have. Ah! Let's turn this up. Ah! So there you have it. Pasta Tortellini Primavera. Enjoy!