Tag Archives: peas

Pea and ham pasta

Leave a reply

This is surely a nursery stalwart, and I cut this out of a BBC Good Food magazine earlier this year and hid it as it’s pasta and it’s too easy to eat pasta. But, as I seem to be on a carb fest I scheduled this for dinner last night and it was absolutely delicious. Warming, comforting, cosy, just as our government crashes and burns the economy. We ate it in front of the fire trying to keep sane (and warm). I have changed this slightly as don’t agree what they did with the peas (they say cook them in the last few minutes of the pasta cooking but this is impractical if you want to then puree the peas, see later).

This serves two but as a small dinner, augmenting the pasta to 250g, it served three of us fine.

200g conchiglie pasta (don’t fight it like I tried to, this is a great shape for this dish, we used the smaller-size shells, not tiny tiny but just normal, recipe calls for conchiglione which are the big mofos but we didn’t use them)

160g cooked peas
1 red onion, finely chopped

A slosh of olive oil

100g cooked ham

150ml double cream

Juice of half a lemon

40g parmesan, plus extra to serve

Cook the pasta according to the packet instructions, which we know always lie.

At the same time, because cooking is all about multi tasking, heat the oil in the frying pan and fry the onion until soft. Add the ham, cream, lemon juice and parmesan, then season and mix together well. Remove from heat, try not to pick at the bits.

The recipe says to puree some of the peas which you can do if you want (we did). Drain the pasta loosely (ie keep a tiny bit of the water on it) then tip everything into a big pan/frying pan and mix together, serve from the pan if you want and add extra parmesan.

Pea, avocado and ricotta hot cakes (with or without poached eggs)

Leave a reply

These are my new favourite thing. You might be able to tell this as there is no photo of the product all plated up, because I was too busy eating.

The original recipe is from Waitrose magazine (I’ve slightly adapted it) and it serves four. But you can easily make these for fewer and keep leftovers in the fridge (20seconds zap in microwave) for a really quick, tasty and nutritious lunch. They are much more filling than they seem as there’s a lot of protein and good fats in there (okay so the ricotta may not be the best fat you can get but come on).

You need:

110g frozen garden peas

250g ricotta

Half an avocado for the hot cake mixture, more for serving it with – as you like

100g self-raising flour, you can go part or whole wholemeal if you like

3 eggs, separated, but not for long

about 3 tablespoons of olive oil for the frying

Peashoots/avocado to serve.

The recipe shows this with poached eggs, which is how we had it, but I had the hot cakes warmed up two days later with just avocado for a super fast lunch (from conception to partial digestion in under four minutes as I had an interview to do). You can of course serve these with whatever you want and I can’t help thinking they’d make a good breakfast.

This is what you do:

Put a pan of water onto boil, when boiling add the peas and simmer for two minutes. Drain and cool under cold water. Tip into a food processor with the ricotta, half an avocado, flour and three of the egg yolks. Whizz up, season.

Separately, whisk up the 3 egg whites until stiff, then fold into the pea/ricotta mixture.

Put a large frying pan on with some oil (you will need to do these in batches unless your pan is huge). You use one or two large dollops per cake – see how you go. Cook for about two mins. Unlike almost evert-other-thing I make like this, when you turn them the underside has actually set and doesn’t stick (or mine didn’t) and I didn’t have to chase it round the pan and end up crying.

Flip (it may swidge a bit) and cook until the other side is done – I mean this is obvious right?. Keep warm whilst you make the rest.

That’s it. Serve, as above, with poached eggs, avocado and peashoots.