I returned home after being away for a week and Stu confidently informed me there wasn’t any food in the house. It was Sunday night and I didn’t feel like cooking anyway so we got takeaway. Monday night I arrived home from work to check out this “no food situation” and was astounded at the bounty in the fridge – a handful of mushrooms, half a bag of almost-past-it spinach, cream, bacon, eggs, parmesan… more than enough to make a delicious carbonara-ish dinner. I hate supermarkets, so after dinner I did my grocery shop online for delivery on Tuesday.
However, when Tuesday rolled around as per usual my groceries weren’t going to be delivered in time for dinner so I had to make another meal from what we had on hand. Looking into the fridge and the pickings were definitely a little slim but I had a bit of feta, frozen peas, natural yoghurt and more pasta, plus the basil from my garden. I remembered this delicious Yotam Ottolenghi recipe from his Jerusalem cookbook for pasta with yoghurt. It sounds weird – but it’s seriously good. The yoghurt is much lighter than cream and the explosion of flavour from the chilli and sweetness of the peas makes for a super yum dinner. Stu even got seconds and maybe thirds which reinforces how good this is because he isn’t a fan of meals without meat.
This meal will serve 6 but you can absolutely half the quantities. It also reheats well for lunch the next day.
Ingredients
- 500g Greek yoghurt
- 150ml olive oil
- 4 garlic cloves
- 500g frozen peas, defrosted
- 500g pasta
- 60g pine nuts
- 2 tsp chilli flakes
- 40g basil leaves
- 240g feta
- salt and pepper
Method
- Put the yoghurt, 90ml of olive oil, garlic and 100g of the peas into a food processor. Blitz until smooth and transfer to a large mixing bowl.
- Cook the pasta in salted water until al dente. In the last few minutes of cooking, add the rest of the peas.
- In a small fry pan, heat the remaining olive oil, pine nuts and chilli flakes and cook until the pine nuts are golden.
- Drain the pasta and peas and gradually add the pasta to the yoghurt sauce, stirring as you do. This will help to prevent the yoghurt from splitting.
- Add the basil, feta, and season with salt and pepper. Serve dressed with the chilli pine nuts.
