Pasta with smoked salmon and walnuts

[doctortim]

The pasta making is coming along well (thanks guys!), to the point where I'm now able to both make pasta and make a decent sauce simultaneously without botching one or the other too badly. Tonight's was fettucini in a creamy smoked salmon and walnut sauce. It wasn't terrible, but it was quite dry (the walnuts didn't help this) and felt like it was lacking something.

Does anyone have a recipe for making an incarnation of this dish that will blow me away? Or tips that will set me in the right direction. I still have plenty of salmon and walnuts leftover, and I'm game to try again.

[For what it's worth, here's what I did tonight: sautéed some garlic in butter, then added the walnuts and salmon for the 10 seconds it took me to get the cream and pour it in. Seasoned with salt, pepper, and a bit of fresh parsley, and let it simmer until it reduced a little, then tossed with the fettucini. Then came on eGullet to complain about it ]

[Kevin72]

Puree some of the walnuts with some of the cream to make a paste?

Add chives in the sauce?

[Bill Miller]

Add a little parmesan cheese to the walnut/garlic/cream mixture. Don't reduce quite as much and add the smoked salmon off the fire at the last minute. Kind of a lite alfredo/smoked salmon suace with walnuts.

[chow guy]

I make a cream sauce with smoked salmon, scallions, capers and fresh chives and sometimes I go crazy and add wasabi. You have to watch reducing the cream too much, so it's not too thick.

[highchef]

toast the walnut pieces first so they can stand up to the smoked salmon. Hold some pasta water back if the noodles pull up too much, a ladle of the starchy water will smooth it back out in an instant over low heat. Just cook the noodles shy of al dente and let them finish in the already made cream sauce. definately add the salmon last and see if that works for you. I've done this a couple of times with spinach thrown in right after the salmon. It wilts as you plate.

[doctortim]

Thanks for your suggestions. I played around with this a bit over the weekend, with some success. Toasting the walnuts first was definitely an improvement. I had made a half-hearted attempt the first time, but I was hungry and didn't allow enough time for them to toast properly. After toasting I crushed them large enough for a bit of bite (gotta love biting in and releasing of all of that toasty goodness), but small enough to distribute pretty well through the pasta.

I was careless and let the cream reduce too much, but a bit of pasta water straightened that out. Off heat I grated some parmensan into it, and added the salmon, then tossed it all together. Having made it three times now I can say that overcooking the salmon was to blame for the problems with the first incarnation, rather than the walnuts as I initially thought.

The dish is now fit for public consumption