Creamy pasta with yoghurt, peas and chilli

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

  1. 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.
  2. Cook the pasta in salted water until al dente. In the last few minutes of cooking, add the rest of the peas.
  3. In a small fry pan, heat the remaining olive oil, pine nuts and chilli flakes and cook until the pine nuts are golden.
  4. 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.
  5. Add the basil, feta, and season with salt and pepper. Serve dressed with the chilli pine nuts.

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