Recipe Reduction #100 at last

Kale, Tomato and Lemon Magic Spaghetti
From A Modern Way To Cook
 
Time she said it would take: 15 minutes
Time it actually took: 22 minutes and I only made a half recipe

Before I say all the bad stuff about this recipe, I want to say just this:
       It tasted good!

Here's an outline of the technique:
Put the spaghetti in a pan with olive oil, halved cherry tomatoes, and the zest of a lemon. Pour a little boiling water over it, slap on a lid, bring to a boil, remove the lid and boil for about ten minutes.
You have to "turn" the spaghetti every 30 seconds to a minute so it doesn't stick to the bottom of the pan and burn. Meanwhile you strip the leaves off a bunch a kale, tear them into bite-sized pieces, and add them to the pan.
When most of the water has evaporated, it's done. That took just a little longer than ten minutes.

The only change I made to her ingredients were to reduce the oil--she called for 7 !!! tablespoons of olive oil--almost a half cup!!! It might have tasted good if you're on a high-fat diet, but just the idea grossed me out. I used less than two.

On the other hand, all that oil might have kept the pasta from sticking to the pan. I did a lot of pan scraping in my ten minutes.

I did have one other deviation from her stated recipe--it called for the zest of two lemons, but then told you to "grate in the zest of both lemons". So was the zesting time included in the total time, or not?  I included it, and discovered that it takes me about two minutes to zest a lemon. If I'd done a full recipe instead of a half, that would have added another two minutes to my total time. (A minor detail.)

The only other reason I can imagine my time was so off is that she appears to have a kettle of water boiling in her kitchen at all times. Or maybe one of those electric instant boilers. I started my timer at the point when I put the pot of water on to boil. While it heated I prepared the rest of the ingredients, but still had to wait a minute.

One final note: unless your kale is really tender, put it in at the beginning of the cook time, not the end. I put mine in about halfway through and it was still very challenging. Not the recipe's fault, though.

All bad-mouthing aside, it's a surprisingly great recipe! I'll be repeating this one. With mushrooms!

(And if you haven't heard enough on the subject...) there's a certain online chef (okay, it's Marc at https://norecipes.com) who has the best recipes ever. I've not had a single one go wrong and they've all been delicious. But even he says lies like this: mince garlic, peel and mince ginger, finely dice onion, peel and cube 4-5 Japanese eggplants, chop a tomato, seed and dice a green pepper. 
          Prep time: 5 minutes. 
 
I can close my eyes and imagine an experienced chef doing all that in five minutes. Maybe. So maybe the lesson I'm finally going to learn is simple: count the number of ingredients needing preparation and multiply by 3. Then allow twice that time and hope for the best.