This recipe comes from a Cooking from A to Zest video. My kids love watching this series of instructional cooking videos. I hope they grow up loving to cook!

To make the salad, boil a pot of water, add some salt, and pour in the penne. Cook the penne as directed.

Fill a salad bowl with fresh spinach leaves.

To make your own garlic paste, mince the garlic, add some coarse salt, and press and grind them together with the flat of a knife.

Add the garlic paste to the spinach bowl. (Zowie! This adds such a zing to the flavor of the salad that I may actually skip or decrease the amount of garlic paste next time.)

Next, grate some lemon zest into the bowl.

A tip from the calamitous cook: Be careful not to nick your thumb during this step. (Not that I did that… but just in case you might. 🙂 ) The next step is squeezing the juice out of the lemon – ouch!

After adding the lemon zest and juice into the bowl, add some halved cherry tomatoes (or roma or grape tomatoes).

Once the penne has cooked, scoop out about a fourth cup of the starchy water.

(My water is not starchy because life happens… The pasta was done before I was ready for it to be done, and I absent-mindedly drained all that starchy water into the sink. If this happens to you – if your pasta cools before you’re ready – you can reheat it by pouring boiling water over it, or by dropping it briefly into boiling water. This is what I did in the picture above.)

Drain the pasta, and pour it – steaming hot – over the spinach. This will wilt the spinach slightly.

For some reason, I love this picture of the steam rising from the bowl. I find it comforting.

Here it is again:

Next, crumble some chevre over the penne. Any type of soft goat cheese should work.

Yum! Forget the penne. Get me some Rosemary & Olive Oil crackers, and I’m set!

Pour the hot, starchy water over the goat cheese to soften it.

Add salt, pepper, and olive oil. The salad is ready to toss!

As the salad is tossed, the chevre will mix with the other ingredients, making a creamy dressing.

Yum! This salad has such distinctive flavors, and it was fun to make!

But just in case anyone thought this was a relatively calamity-free cooking experience…

This is what was going on in another corner of the house while I was busy with the salad:

Do you think the little angel cared a whit that she just wasted an entire roll of tape??

Nope, not one whit, little carefree girl!