capri lemon pasta - Maria Elia recipe

capri lemon pasta

Have been eyeing up the recipe for capri lemon pasta in Maria Elia's The Modern Vegetarian for a little while and, since I had both leftover lemons and leftover double cream, I thought the universe was trying to tell me something.

I decided to skip the asparagus as no English asparagus was available and I'm rather of the opinion that bad asparagus is worse than no asparagus. So just podded broad beans, peas and the double cream and lemon sauce. And some parsley because I had some parsley and a handful of chopped parsley never hurts anything.

I usually like her recipes but I thought this one wasn't written quite right - her suggested ordering leaves you with no time to pod the broad beans which is the most time consuming bit of the whole dish - and, if I'd followed her directions to the letter, I think the sauce would have ended up too liquidy. I skipped the cooking water she directs you to add and, even then, had to let it all simmer together for a couple of minutes to get the sauce thick enough.

 The resulting dish is lovely, though, like a lemon posset with added yummyness. My husband thought it was too lemoney, though, and would have preferred it as a side dish. It occurs to me that it would be a lovely way to serve broad beans and/or peas as a side dish. Mmmm.

I tried another recipe from Maria Elia's The Modern Vegetarian the other day.  Sweetcorn and lemongrass soup.  No photo this time as, to be frank, it was not a dish that looked very appealing.  It kind of looked like porridge!  Lumpy porridge with bits of sweetcorn floating in it.

But it was pretty tasty. Overall verdict was that this one is a useful recipe to have in the mix - all its ingredients, except for the lemongrass, are ingredients that I usually have around, so it would work well as a "forgot to go to the shops today" kind of meal.  The milk base for the soup makes it more filling than many soups but somehow not stodgy.  Good stuff.

Once I'd made it, I thought "go me, I actually followed the recipe for once!" but then I realised that I kind of didn't.  I didn't measure the butter or milk or flour, just estimated.  I didn't use a white onion, I used a red one.  I used frozen sweetcorn rather than fresh.  And I added creamed coconut rather than creme fraiche.  Never mind.

I did follow the basic principles of the recipe and I thought the milk base, rather than stock base, was quite interesting.  I liked the hint of coconut from the creamed coconut, though, and I think I might try substituting in coconut milk for the milk next time.  Also quite tempted to add in some coriander.  And maybe a little bit of lime juice.

I'm relatively new to Thai flavours and am currently a little obsessed with coconut milk.  The fresh lemongrass for the soup was lovely - smelled amazing and made the soup so fragrant.

I'll do a proper review of The Modern Vegetarian sometime soon but, currently, I'm thinking that I do rather like it but, somehow, I find myself tinkering a lot with the recipes and using it more for inspiration than to follow exactly.  Which isn't a bad thing, particularly, and is quite often the way that I am with cookbooks. 

carrot and gram flour pancakes, hummous and salad

Batter

One of the rather too many cookbooks I've acquired recently is The Modern Vegetarian by Maria Elia.  On the very first page is a recipe for carrot and gram flour pancakes that I've been meaning to try out for ages.

So, today, I did.  It was really good!

It reminded me a lot of a Gujarati dish called "poodla" that my nanima (maternal grandmother) taught me to make.  It's interesting to me that a) a lot of dishes exist the world over in different formats and b) that they can taste so different in different contexts.

Pancakes

Spiced gram flour pancakes (with fresh coriander and chilli in the batter) seem instinctively to me an Indian flavour and I can imagine my namima knocking these out, "measuring" everything by eye, and serving them with natural yoghurt or tamarind chutney or green chutney (coriander, chillis and green apple.)  I'm quite tempted to do that next time. 

Pancakes with hummous

But, this time, I followed Maria Elia's idea and went for topping them with hummous and salad.

She suggests carrot hummous (basically normal hummous with roasted carrots blended in) but I decided that I didn't really fancy carrot and chickpea pancakes topped with blended carrot and chickpea as that seemed rather too much carrot and chickpea for me.  So, I just made my normal hummous (the classic way) which I think worked pretty well.

Pancakes and hummous and salad

I also didn't quite follow her suggestion on the salad because I had a few things to use up - I went for pea shoots, baby plum tomatoes, spring onions and feta with some black pepper and olive oil on top.  Yum.

Next time, I might try a blend of flour (nanima recommends 1/4 chapati flour 3/4 gram flour for poodla which might work nicely), adding in some spring onions, maybe courgette rather than carrots...?