#36 - Fresh Beany Dinners
Green bean pasta with walnut and cheddar pesto + braised runner beans with green chilli salsa, mozzarella and crispy chickpeas
Hello lovely subscribers!
Thank you for all your support, which directly enables me to spend time every week writing this newsletter. I appreciate you all very much! For newbies here, every fortnight, free subscribers get an exclusive recipe from me. Every single week, paid subscribers will get an extra recipe, plus lots of recommendations of places to eat, things to watch, books to read. If you’d like to support my work by upgrading your membership, I would like that very much.
Now, onto the food. I LOVE beans in any form. My grandparent’s garden was rich with runner beans, green beans and broad beans, and so I spent all summers growing up subsisting on a diet heavy with the stuff. They are still foods I feast on now when they are in season, and there are so many fun ways to eat them that aren’t a simple boiled or steamed jobby! This week’s newsletter contains a recipe for a nostalgic cheddar pesto pasta rich with green beans, and a braised runner bean and mozzarella salad that may just be the tastiest thing I’ve eaten all year.
Enjoy!
Sophie x
P.S. There are also bean recipes in my cookbook Tucking In, including a green bean, chicken and coconut salad, or all the greens fried rice with a sesame egg. Like the sound of those? Why don’t you buy a copy!
The Recipes
Green Bean Pasta with Walnut and Cheddar Pesto
As a person who grew up in the UK in the 90s/early 2000s, there was pretty much only ever one cheese on the menu. That cheese was cheddar. It went on pizza; it went on pasta; it went literally anywhere you wanted it to be. My palate has broadened these days to include many cheeses from around the world, but the particular nostalgic joy I get from grating cheddar on my pesto pasta is unparalleled.
The pesto I’ve made here is not traditional in the slightest (purists, look away), but using cheddar instead of parmesan gives the sauce an amazing sharpness and creaminess, which is excellent with bitter walnuts and bright basil.
I like added green veg to pesto pasta whenever I eat it, and luckily for us, courgettes and green beans are in their prime right now, and are PERFECT with pesto. You do sometimes get green beans and potatoes with pesto genovese traditionally, so it’s not too much of a reach.
Serves 4
70g walnuts
80g basil
70g cheddar, plus more to serve
1 small clove of garlic
1 lemon
200g green beans
1 ½ courgettes
400g casarecce or trofie
30g butter
salt, pepper and olive oil
Toast your walnuts in a dry frying pan until they are lightly fragrant and slightly darker in colour. Allow them to cool.
Tip your walnuts into a food processor, and add your basil. Grate in your cheddar, and peel your garlic, then add those both in too. Squeeze in the juice of your lemon, then whizz it up to a paste.
With the machine running, drizzle in 120ml of olive oil until you have a smooth sauce. Season your sauce to taste with salt and pepper.
Bring a large pan of salted water up to a boil.
Add your pasta to the salted water, and cook it for 4 minutes less than the packet tells you to.
Cut the ends off your beans, and slice your courgette into rounds. Once the pasta cooking time up, add the veg to the pasta pan, and cook them for 2 minutes longer.
Drain your pasta and veg in a colander over the sink. Get it back into your pan, then spoon in your pesto and add your butter. Give it a really good mix, then adjust the seasoning as needed.
Spoon your pasta into bowls, and grate over a bit more cheddar and some black pepper. Serve it up.
Braised Runner Beans with Green Chilli Salsa, Mozzarella and Chickpeas
The runner beans of my youth were always stringed through those little metal devices, and cooked simply in salted water and served in butter. Whilst I still love eating them this way, in recent years I have turned to the more Levantine way of cooking them, where you cut them into small chunks and braise them for a while in tasty liquid until they are soft.
In this salad, I cook them this way before tossing them with a green chilli salsa similar to a North African chermoula, rich with parsley and coriander, green chillies and cumin seeds. The result is a spicy, slightly bitter condiment that is perfect with the milkiness of mozzarella and a crispy chickpea.
I don’t say this lightly - this salad might just be my favourite recipe I’ve created all year. You will find me chomping down on it for the remainder of the summer.
Serves 4 as a side