The Easiest Lemon Pasta Recipe with Ina Garten _ Barefoot Contessa - Cook Like a Pro _ Food Network

Lemon .

Capellini is just about the fastest weeknight pasta meal you can make .

And one of the reasons is because the Capellini is so thin .

It cooks in 2 to 3 minutes .

So I've got £1 of Capellini .

I'm gonna put it in a big pot of boiling salted water .

And the amazing thing is the sauce doesn't take much longer to make .

It's lemons and butter .

So the first thing I need is a half a pound of butter .

I know , I know it's a lot of butter .

But after a bad day at work , it's always good .

Two lemons , I need the zest and the juice .

So I just want to get that very , very thin yellow part of the lemon .

And remember you always want to zest them before you juice them .

I'm gonna do a second lemon .

This pasta is really versatile .

You can even serve it with a little shrimp or chicken or if you've had a really bad day at the office , you can just have it all by itself .

It's a lot of lemon zest , but you really want a lot of flavor .

Lemon zest right into the butter and then the juice of both lemons .

I love my little juicer so fast .

You definitely wanna use fresh lemon juice .

I'm not a big fan of anything but fresh lemon juice always has that like awful metallic flavor .

Even if you juice lemons in advance like a day or two and even in the fridge just doesn't taste the same .

Ok .

This goes right into the pan with the butter and the lemon zest .

One teaspoon of sauce , one teaspoon of pepper just swirl it around .

I think the pasta is done and this is the key to the whole thing instead of draining the water .

What I'm gonna do is take the pasta and put it right into the sauce and then it's gonna cook in the sauce for , you know , just about a minute or two and it's gonna absorb all the butter and the lemon .

But don't throw out the pasta water because actually if the sauce gets a little too thick , you can always take a little of the pasta water which has some starch in it and thin it out a little bit .

Toss it all together .

So all the lemon and the butter and the zest and all the seasonings get all mixed in .

Well , it's a week night and it's just about dinner time .

So I just want to make sure this is really good .

Someone needs to do one serving like this and I think it needs a little lemon zest on Tarr .

Now .

I would say weeknight dinner doesn't get any easier than this or , or delicious .