Things To Do With Vegetables When You’re…
… not ready for summer to end.
Welcome to the second edition of Things To Do With Vegetables When You’re…, my monthly celebration of vegetables and fruits and all good plant-y things in the form of a recipe I’ve cooked for my family recently.
Last time we started with one of my favourite things to eat (flatbreads with really tasty vegetable toppings) and this month we have what is probably my favourite way of eating pasta.
I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.
Wil
Summer ends in Finland precisely the same way college parties did for me twenty years ago: all too quickly, passed out in a bathtub, and having impressed nobody with my throaty renditions of My Chemical Romance songs…
Yep. Precisely the same.
And since autumn lasts all of 20 minutes here in Finland, I’m now firmly preparing myself for The Long Winter that is likely just weeks away. Thankfully, there is still beautiful fresh Finnish produce still lining the shelves, which gives me a semblance of summer to hold on to for a while.
This edition of Things To Do With Vegetables When You’re… features something I love doing throughout the year, though it seems particularly appropriate now at this liminal point at which beautiful summer veg is still available but the weather is starting to turn that little bit cooler…
The versatility of puree
I’ve made a fuss about puree on this newsletter before. A good puree can really bring a dish together for me in the way it’s a bit like a sauce but still very much a side. But what I also like to do is to blitz softened vegetables down and use the resulting creamy puree as a dressing for pasta. Not only is this delicious, but using vegetables this way has pretty much stopped my ever needing to use cream in pasta sauces, despite my absolutely loving a creamy pasta. Vegetables like courgette and aubergine are so creamy in themselves, they give that same richness while being so much more interesting.
And, yes, as a father of two, I can confirm it functions as a semi-reliable way of getting them to eat vegetables. Actually, my 3-year-old girl calls the recipe I’m sharing today “Elphaba pasta”.
Elphaba pasta is probably the pasta I make most often. It uses courgette and spinach with a touch of fragrant fennel seed to dress the pasta in an emerald-green sauce. But what makes this really delicious are the slow-caramelised onions, blue cheese and honey studded through the pasta. It just makes every bite a little bit special.
This is how I put it together…
Courgette, blue cheese and caramelised onion pasta gratin
Ingredients
300g short cut pasta such as Fusilli, Gnocchi, Conchiglie
1 large courgette (about 500g)
100g baby spinach
3 large cloves of garlic
½ tsp fennel seeds
1 large onion (red or yellow)
½ tsp sugar
½ tsp honey
100g blue cheese (The variety is up to you. I’ve used everything from Stilton to a Finnish blue cheese called Aura. I recently used a hard blue goats cheese which was particularly good)
50g parmesan
Method
Start with the onions
Put a pan on a medium-low heat with a glug of oil, then add the (sliced) onion with a pinch of salt. Don’t rush this. The job is to soften them slowly without colour, not to sear them from the second they hit the pan. Stir every so often for 20–25 minutes until they’re really soft. Then sprinkle in the sugar and let them take on a deep golden colour by raising the heat. Then put them in a bowl and set aside to cool.Cook the pasta
Cook the pasta until you get to the ever so slightly chalky side of al dente (the pasta will continue cooking while it bakes later in the oven). Save a cup of the water before draining.Make the green sauce
While the pasta boils, heat some oil in a large pan. Add the garlic and fennel seeds and let them gently toast away for a minute or two. Split the courgette lengthways then slice it quite thinly (a few mm thick or so) just so it doesn’t take ages to cook down. Add to the pan with the garlic/fennel seed and cook until softened and translucent but not taking on colour. Courgette can be very watery as they grow bigger, so take some time to cook away some of the liquid that releases from them if things seem very watery at the bottom of your pan, this will concentrate the flavour. Then add the spinach and let it wilt away. Blend it all until very smooth ( I prefer doing so in a blender but a stick blender can do the job). If it’s very thick, loosen with a splash of pasta water to get a spoonable, silky sauce but it shouldn’t really need it as the vegetables, juicy as they are, should blitz to quite a loose puree. Taste for seasoning.Bring it together
Turn the pasta in the courgette sauce so everything is nicely combined. Then, in a small bowl, mix the caramelised onions with the crumbled blue cheese and the honey. Then fold this gently through the pasta. Don’t stir too aggressively; you want streaks of sweet onion and sharp cheese running through the green.Bake
Heat the oven to 200°C (180°C fan)/400°F (350°F fan). Transfer everything to a baking dish, grate the parmesan on top, and bake for 20 minutes until bubbling and golden on top.
To serve
Eat with a lovely fresh salad, maybe with some thinly sliced/julienned apple and a sharp vinaigrette, the acidity will really cut through the richness and sweetness.
The other creamy vegetable-based pasta sauce I’m always making
Aubergine: I will blister and burn a whole aubergine until totally charred and collapsed. I’ll then scoop out the flesh and add this to some slowly caramelised onions, some thyme and a drizzle of honey (there’s a theme here isn’t there?). I often top this with a little feta and particularly enjoy it with a pasta like pappardelle.
And now for something completely different
I posted the first story from my Wil Reidie’s Weekly Catastrophe newsletter this week (which I’m hosting on my very own indie website wilreidie.com).
The story is called Prince and the Pea, or It Started That Day with the End of Suppositories. Here’s a random extract…
She is a headstrong girl, my wife. Your classic, Finnish, no-nonsense sort who would absolutely hold her own if ever abandoned in the woods for the night. But she’s just not built for such mechanical invasion of another human being as the administration of suppositories demands.
I, however, am all over that shit. Having been a chef for so long, the gruesome, the handling of flesh to excessive limits, even the bloody has become second nature to me now. Gauging the eyes out of pigs’ heads and ripping the guts from countless Thumper-adjacent bunny rabbits will do that to a person. Popping a little tablet of Tic Tac-shaped painkiller up another human’s arsehole is no more daunting to me than shaking a hand or giving someone a peck on the cheek.
You may well not want to meet me in person now having learnt that… read the rest
And finally
This summer I did a little trial run of 1-to-1 online cooking classes. They were so much fun, and the feedback was so generous, that I’ve decided to keep them going. Because I put a lot of planning into each class, I can only open a handful of spots at a time. If you’d like one, you can find all the details and book your place below.
And remember: paid subscribers get a generous discount!
Coming next…
Next week will be a paid subscriber edition; the latest chapter in my ongoing cookbook The Prep List. Among lots of other things I’m sharing (think flavoured butters and oils, butter sauces and “Nordic pesto”) we’ll also be turning the beautiful stock we made in chapter 4 into a very special red wine sauce.
Paid subscribers make this newsletter and my writing career possible. If you read my work and enjoy it, an annual subscription works out at just $2.50 a month and it makes all the difference.
Wil