Category: recipes

Categories
dinner meat mediterranean recipes

Potato and chorizo tortilla with chard agrodolce

This tortilla was dinner tonight, together with some chard agrodolce. It was all delicious. We used royal blue potatoes – purple skin, yellow flesh – though the skin didn’t stay purple through cooking, alas. The chorizo was from Black Pig.  I think the success of the tortilla would depend on using a really flavourful chorizo (this one was fantastic). In the absence of that, I’d add a couple of skinned roasted peppers and some smoked paprika. This tortilla has less egg per potato volume than a traditional tortilla, and is thinner (about 2 cm thick), but that’s how I like it.

The chard agrodolce was a good match. This was a large bunch of ruby chard, stemmed, chopped, blanched and squeezed dry, then sauteed with olive oil, minced garlic and a handful of currants, and finally tossed with a splash of aged red wine vinegar and some toasted pine nuts. A++ would make again.

 

Potato and chorizo tortilla

2 onions, quartered and sliced
olive oil
5 medium waxy or all-rounder potatoes, scrubbed, cut into 1-2 mm slices
1 cured chorizo, ~120 g, sliced
1 good handful chopped parsley leaves
4 eggs
salt and pepper

Heat the olive oil in a frypan over moderate heat, add the onions, and cook until translucent and soft. They’ll get quite a lot more cooking, so no need to take them to the golden stage at this point. Add the raw potato slices and continue to fry, stirring frequently, until they are cooked (but still keeping their shape). This took about 15 minutes for us – it will depend on the potato type and how finely they’re sliced. Add the chorizo a few minutes before the end, so its flavour gets mixed through everything.

Turn down the heat under the pan to low. Whisk together the eggs, parsley and salt and pepper, then add to the pan. Give it a very quick stir through, and pat everything down flat. Our mixture was about 2.5 cm thick at this stage. Leave to cook until the middle of the frittata is getting solid, and just the top remains runny. At this point, you can flip it if you are highly skilled. If you’re like me, on the other hand, you can instead just put the pan under the grill until the top is cooked.

Serves 4, with a vegetable side.

Categories
breakfast dessert recipes vegetarian

Roast rhubarb with lime and cointreau

This is so basic it’s hardly worth writing, but for my own records, it was great.

500 g rhubarb stems (weighed after trimming)
2/3 cup sugar
juice of 1 decent-sized lime
a good glug of Cointreau

Cut the rhubarb into 3 cm lengths. Put in a baking dish, and toss together with the sugar, lime and Cointreau. Roast, uncovered, at 180 C for about 20 minutes, until the rhubarb is softened. The pieces will still be intact and beautiful red. Let it sit for a couple of minutes before eating, or eat cold later. Good with yoghurt for breakfast, or creme fraiche and crisp almond biscuits for dessert.

 

Categories
dinner fritters recipes science vegetarian

Fritter science, non-best-practice version

I like to do my culinary science the right way. Standardisation, controls, a well-thought-out experimental design. This isn’t always possible to achieve on the fly, however, so tonight’s dinner should be considered as exploratory experimental work that will require rigorous follow-up. Fortunately fritters lend themselves to this kind of experimentation, as you can fry a couple, taste, modify the batter, fry another couple, modify again, and so on.

I felt like corn and zucchini fritters for dinner, and wanted to try making them with besan flour. I prepped the vegetables: corn, zucchini, scallions, coriander leaves and chili flakes. I then made up a batter based on this recipe: besan flour, plain flour, salt and water. Mixed the vegetables and the batter, fried the first batch of four, and split one with Ted for a taste test. Not bad! They were particularly good hot off the pan, crispy on the outside and light and toasty inside. I wondered, however, whether they might not be better with a little bit of feta crumbled in. So I added some feta to the mix, and cooked up another four. These were also good straight off the pan, though the feta was a little dominating in flavour. Still, the cheese was in there now, so we pressed on and cooked another four, leaving the rest on a plate underneath a tea-towel to stay warm until we were ready to sit down.

We were pretty peckish at this point, so while cooking we split another one of the first feta fritters once they had cooled down a bit, and actually the flavour was pretty good – more appealing than the no-feta version. Both the feta-free and feta-ful versions, however, were getting slightly lumpen as they cooled. There was enough mixture left for two more fritters, so I added about a quarter of a teaspoon of baking powder to this before frying them off. Ah ha! Now we see a difference – there were a few little bubbles rising to the surface as we cooked the first side, and the fritters were puffier and had straighter sides. Fresh off the pan, the first one of these that we shared was softer and lighter than the previous versions, and tasted great.

We sat down to eat a few more, with some salad and roast tomatoes. After about 5 minutes, when all of the fritters had had a chance to cool down a bit, we did a side-by-side tasting of the three versions. The first version (no feta, no baking powder) was ok, but quite dense. The second (feta, no baking powder) was noticably softer than the first version, and the feta added some more interest to the flavour. The third (feta, baking powder) was quite similar to the second, but still a little lighter.

So, the secret is feta and/or baking powder, right? Perhaps, but I am tormented by the confounding variables. The feta-free fritters were cooked earliest, so were the coldest, and maybe that’s why they seemed less good. What if I cooked the different batches for different times, so that the first set were actually just overcooked? What if the performance of the batter improves with sitting – some fritter recipes do call for a resting period before you start cooking. There’s no way to disentangle these factors! I need to make three batters in parallel, rest them the same amount of time, and then fry a fritter from each batter in the same pan at the same time, using the same amount of batter for each one. Only then will I know the truth. Until then, the recipe below is the one I currently hypothesise to be the best. Further testing required (and I will be happy to oblige – these were damn good fritters).

 

Corn, zucchini and besan flour fritters

2 medium zucchini, finely julienned on a mandoline
kernels cut from 2 cobs of corn
4 scallions, finely sliced
2 large handfuls of coriander leaves, chopped
2 large pinches of chili flakes, or to taste
150 g besan flour
3 tablespoons plain flour
1 heaped teaspoon baking powder
salt and pepper
170-200 ml water
80 g feta, crumbled
olive oil

Sprinkle the julienned zucchini well with salt, and leave to drain in a colander or sieve for 30 minutes. Squeeze out excess water, the spread out over a tea-towel, roll it up lengthwise, and twist to squeeze out all the remaining liquid. Put the zucchini into a bowl with the corn, scallions, coriander leaves and chili flakes, and mix.

In another bowl, sieve together the besan flour, plain flour, baking powder, salt and pepper. Stir in the water, to make a thick batter. Combine this with the vegetables and the feta. The mixture should be thick but not excessively stiff. Add a little extra water to thin if necessary.

Heat a little olive oil in a frypan over moderate heat. Spoon fritter-sized portions of batter into the pan, and flatten them out so they are about 1 cm thick. Allow them to cook until browning on the bottom, then flip and continue to cook until golden on the other side and cooked in the middle. Remove to a plate and keep warm.

Makes about 14 fritters (about 7-8 cm in diameter).

We ate the fritters with some roast cherry tomatoes  and some snow peas and pea shoots (all harvested from our garden! I was overly pessimistic about our chances of getting more ripe tomatoes on the weekend).

 

Categories
breakfast chitchat garden recipes vegetarian

Baked eggs with backyard tomatoes

This summer was the first time we’ve ever had a garden we could grow things in. We’d previously attempted (and eventually killed) many pots of herbs in many apartments, but nothing more. Despite this not very stellar record, I was smitten with horticultural lust when we moved into a house with a sunny back wall and a fallow garden bed. I went a bit overboard ordering heirloom vegetable seeds from Diggers, then carried through a major operation starting seeds of seven different kinds of tomatoes, two kinds of peas, many different herbs, Italian broccoli varieties, and so on. And then, after preparing the soil (and filling quite a few pots as well) I planted them all out, pruned, staked, weeded, picked caterpillars and treated for whiteflies. It was a joy. It made me happy every morning when I went outside and checked how much things had grown, what varieties were flowering, which was the first to set fruit, which the first to ripen.

Like I say, it was blissfully satisfying. And I will do it all again next summer. But with one difference: I will start about three months earlier. I knew I was getting everything started late. We’d just moved to Melbourne, I was trying to catch up with things in the lab, we worked some weekends, I delayed putting in the seed order because was I really sure that I was going to do this, given my previously black thumb? By the time I committed and put in the order, it was the start of November. The first seedlings came up in late November, and I transplanted them outside in late December. This might have been ok in Brisbane, but Melbourne was not quite so forgiving. Our garden has been a lush, gorgeous, endlessly enjoyable paradise in which I have spent scores of happy hours working or sitting, but our first tomatoes only ripened a couple of weeks ago. About the same time, in fact, that I was writing an entry about how the autumnal weather was making me long for osso buco.

Since then, despite the recent rain and cold nights, a handful of tomatoes have slowly ripened, turning yellow or orange or red one by one, like lights coming on at night. Their texture wasn’t the best, but the flavour was excellent – sweet and sharp, each variety distinct. This morning we harvested all that were ripe, to roast for breakfast. We got one jaune flamme, several brown berries and lemon drops, a couple of black cherries, and about twenty incredibly tiny wild sweeties. The plants are becoming decrepit now, dropping brown leaves and looking exhausted. I’ll leave them in for another week or so to see whether any more fruit ripens, and if not then pull them out for compost. But even if this morning’s small dish of tomatoes is all we eat from this crop, it’s still been absolutely worth it. I’ve learned a lot, I’ve shown myself that my thumb is not entirely black, and I’ve gained hours of relaxation and pleasure. I’m without regret, though I have put a reminder in my diary to start the tomato seeds in August this year.

 

Baked eggs and tomatoes with sourdough and chevre

This wasn’t the prettiest dish, but it was delicious. I took our bowl of mixed tomatoes (probably the equivalent of about 25 cherry tomatoes), halved all but the smallest, tossed with olive oil, salt and pepper, and roasted in a smallish baking dish in a moderate oven (about 160C) until they were softened, about 15-20 minutes. I pushed the tomatoes aside to make a couple of indentations, into which I cracked eggs. Back in the oven for 5 minutes or so, checking frequently towards the end, until the whites were cooked but the yolks were still runny. Meanwhile, I’d toasted a slice of sourdough, and spread with some young chevre. I spooned the egg-and-tomato mixture out of the baking dish over the toast, and ate immediately.

Categories
dinner meat recipes

Osso buco not-strictly-milanese

After a weekend of 37 degrees C a couple of weeks ago, it has rapidly turned autumnish. The doona is back on the bed. I shivered through a day at work when it hit 15 degrees in the afternoon and I had come in stupidly wearing just a T-shirt. The figs on the huge tree in our backyard have finally ripened, and there are enough of them that I’ve been able to eat at least a couple of fresh figs every day, to give some away to friends, and to make this delicious fig, hazelnut and brandy cake.  While I was up the ladder picking figs a couple of evenings ago, I smelled the first wood fire of the season from one of our neighbours’ houses – a little early, perhaps, but I’ll be getting our own chimney swept soon.

When I was at the St Kilda farmers market last weekend, it was chilly, drizzling, almost misty. I had a powerful surge of homesickness for the UK and Ireland! Even though there were stalls there selling the last of the heirloom tomatoes of the summer, in all other ways it felt utterly like autumn was upon us. I stocked up on cold-weather vegetables – cavolo nero, kohlrabi, beetroot – and various bits of meat to go in the freezer for episodes of weekend slow-cooking. One of these purchases was some osso buco from Warialda Beef. The slices were enormous, about 500 g each, dark purple in colour and marbled with fat. Warialda cows are rare breed, grass-fed, and slaughtered at two and a half years, and the meat is then dry aged. And oh my god, it tastes so good. I’ve been more in the habit recently of cooking osso buco in stout, to beef (ha) up the flavour a bit, but since this meat looked so good, I cooked it a bit more traditionally in white wine. It was spectacular. Tender, rich, deeply flavoured – the best osso buco I have ever had.

 

three large pieces of osso buco, approx 1.4 kg in total
olive oil
2 onions, peeled, quartered, and sliced
2 decent-sized carrots, peeled and cut into 1 cm cubes
2 sticks celery, cut into 1 cm cubes
2 large glasses white wine
1 tin peeled tomatoes
500 ml stock (chicken or veal)
2 fresh bay leaves
1 large sprig rosemary
salt

1 clove garlic, crushed finely
zest of a lemon
a handful or two of parsley leaves, finely chopped

Season the meat with salt and pepper, then dredge in flour. Heat some olive oil in a large oven-proof saucepan, and brown the meat on each side. Do each piece separately if they are large – don’t crowd them. Remove the meat and set aside.

Add the onions, carrots and celery to the oil remaining in the pan, and cook over moderate heat until the onion is softened and translucent, about 8-10 minutes. Add the wine, stock, the tin of tomatoes (roughly chop them with a knife in the can before adding), bay leaves, rosemary, and a teaspoon of rock salt (less if using table salt). Stir, then add the meat. The meat should be mostly covered by the liquid.

Put the lid on the saucepan and cook in the oven at about 150 C for 2.5-3 hours, until the meat is extremely tender and the liquid has substantially reduced. I tend to turn the meat over every hour or so to make sure both sides get a go under the liquid. This does make it more likely that the marrow will fall out of the bone, so if you value eating the marrow with a spoon (delicious), you might not want to turn them. It’s almost certainly not really necessary.

Just before eating, combine garlic, lemon zest and parsley to make gremolata, and sprinkle over the meat.

We served this with tubetti pasta because we were too lazy to make the more traditional risotto. It was so, so fine.

Categories
asian recipes vegetarian

Spring sushi bowl

Hello comrades. I have lots to report, but I am rather tired, so I will keep this short.

Melbourne is awesome! Life is fab. We have a wee back yard with a lemon tree, a fig tree, lavender, and a rampant mint plant. I am growing seven kinds of tomato from seed, as well as snow peas, zucchini, and forests of herbs. I’ve found excellent markets, pastry shops and restaurants. I dawdle down the streets near our house, transfixed by the lushness and prettiness of people’s front gardens. I’m getting closer to finding a bike route to uni that I am happy with. I love the fact that it’s almost December but I still don’t swelter during the day, and in the evening I can sit in the garden, listening to the cicadas, and appreciate the coolness. I thought it would be the city and inner suburbs that I would love in Melbourne – and I do love them – but our day-to-day life out in Armadale is wonderful. I am very happy. I can imagine living here for a long time.

Here’s what I ate for dinner tonight. Very simple, but satisfying to both the eye and to taste. The cicadas, the garden and the cool night air took care of the other senses.

 

Sushi bowl for one

a handful of cooked brown rice
1 bunch of asparagus
a quarter of a large avocado
a slice of firm tofu
sesame seeds
nori
ponzu

Trim the asparagus, halve the spears, then steam until tender. Peel the avocado segment, then slice crosswise into about 10 slices. Saute the tofu until golden, then cut into bite-size batons.

Spread the rice over the bottom of a flattish bowl. Top with the asparagus, avocado and tofu in an aesthetically pleasing manner (I put asparagus on one side, the avocado fanned out on the other, and tofu in the middle). Sprinkle with sesame seeds, snips of toasted nori, and ponzu. Eat.

Categories
chitchat dessert recipes

Earmuffs, lemon possets, etc

Tedster and I are moving to Melbourne in 13 days. Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck!

… Let me take a short pause here to hyperventilate …

Fortunately, a couple of weekends ago we went to Christmas in July at the Chaddo, and Santa gave Ted a pair of furry earmuffs. We decided tonight that these were the Stress Earmuffs. You would put them on if you were stressed, and they would make everything better. Or perhaps they would just be the outward sign of your stress, so other people would see and treat you nicely. Either way, we have spent the last few hours donning the ‘muffs to express our angst. I have some of the best photographs I’ve ever taken, of Ted wearing the earmuffs and facially demonstrating his stress, but I will not put them on the internet because I love Ted like no other husband and every man deserves his dignity. And also because there are quite a few photos of me looking deranged too.

We’re clearing out our apartment, writing lists of the dozens of things that need to be done each day between now and when we leave, putting earmuffs on, making appointments with an accountant to get several years’ worth of tax returns done, arranging for the utilities to be disconnected, taking photos with earmuffs on, sorting out a couple of cupboards, deciding that this morning’s resolution not to drink any wine today was stupid and should be broken forthwith, and so on. It feels like we’ve been preparing to move forever, but no matter that I thought I was decently organised up until now, crunch time has made me realise how very, very wrong I was. Oh god, excuse me while I go and put something warm and fluffy on my ears.

Part of the moving process is seeing many of our friends for goodbye-for-now meals. There have been many occasions recently, at one or other of these meals, when I’ve looked around the table at the faces of my so, so dear friends and wondered what the hell we are doing leaving. (The answer is job-related.) The eating notes have chronicled many of these meals. The most recent of these was last Friday, when Ian, Lisa, Charly, Rich, Sal and Jim came over to our place. It was an awesome evening.

We started with olives and some saucisson that Lisa brought. Then onion, mustard and fennelseed tart, with a mixed-leaf salad. Then, a little while later, seven hour leg of lamb (more or less like this, just larger in size and cooked for the full seven hours at 120 C) , with mashed potatoes and green beans. And finally, while reclining on the couches afterwards, lemon possets for dessert. The possets are great: fairly small, rich but refreshing, and very easy to make. They also need to be made well ahead of time, which means that your effort upon serving is limited to getting up and getting them out of the fridge. Bonus.

 

Lemon possets

800 ml cream (see note below)
200 g sugar
finely grated zest of three lemons
180 ml lemon juice (from approx three lemons)

Combine the cream, sugar and zest in a saucepan. Bring to a moderate simmer, and cook for four minutes, stirring a few times a minute. Keep an eye on it!

Remove from the heat, let it settle down for a minute, then stir in the lemon juice. Let it sit for a few minutes.

Strain through a sieve into a jug, to get rid of the zest. Pour the strained liquid into eight ramekins. Refrigerate them for at least 4 hours, and preferably closer to 8 (or overnight). This tastes much better and has a more enjoyable texture after it has been really thoroughly chilled.

Serves 8.

 

Note: I used Barambah cream, which looks thick and slightly yellow like double cream, though it is only single cream (36% fat). Most posset recipes call for double cream.

Categories
asian lunch recipes vegetarian

Fried rice with ginger, tofu and spring onion kimchi

Oh man, I feel like hell. I’ve got some revolting laryngitis/bronchitis combination and I haven’t been able to speak properly for a couple of days. I’m the hoarse whisperer, ha ha. I think I have produced my own body weight in phlegm in the last week. How delightful and charming I am!

Anyway, in an attempt to unblock a sinus or two, I made this excellent, ginger- and chili-heavy lunch while home sick from work yesterday. It was delicious enough to cut through my virus-induced anhedonia as soon as I took the first bite. I was asleep on the couch again 20 minutes later, but the brief interlude of enjoyment was nice.


100 g tofu, cut into 1 cm-thick slices
peanut oil
tamari
fish sauce
3 large golden shallots, peeled, halved and finely sliced
1 x 2 x 2 cm piece of fresh ginger, peeled and cut into fine slivers
1 large hot red chili, chopped (including seeds)
1/2 cup left-over cooked brown rice
2/3 cup spring onion kimchi, roughly chopped (it will cook down)
toasted sesame oil

In a frypan, heat a scant splash of peanut oil over moderate heat, then add the tofu slices. Cook on one side until starting to turn golden, then flip and repeat on the other side. Close to the end of cooking, splash in a little soy sauce and fish sauce, and turn the tofu once more to coat. Remove from the pan and set aside. Cut the tofu into batons.

Wipe out the pan, add a dash more oil, and cook the shallots until they are golden and softened. Add the ginger and chili and cook a further three minutes. Add the rice, kimchi, tofu batons, a few drops of tamari and a good drizzle of sesame oil. Keep cooking, stirring all together, for another couple of minutes until everything is warm and toasted. Eat at once.

Categories
asian lunch recipes soup

Miso soup with soba, tofu and vegetables

I’m writing this up not because I think it is anything novel or authentic (it’s not), but for two other quite different reasons. First, I want to remind myself how easy this kind of soup is, given the usual contents of my pantry and fridge. The only things here that I don’t always have on hand are the steamed butternut and the silken tofu, both left over from the laksa we made last night.

Secondly, I was struck by how thoroughly this soup held my attention while I was eating it. Many of the soups I eat are pureed or at least relatively homogeneous. This one is very different. It’s full of bits and pieces of things of varied sizes, shapes and textures, that must be handled in different ways – the broth is spooned up, the tofu nudged onto the spoon and brought to the mouth, the noodles fished for with chopsticks and slurped, the pumpkin and mushrooms held between the chopsticks while bites are taken. When I eat this kind of soup, my mind doesn’t drift, but stays focussed on the food and the action and sensations of eating. This is something that I think is worth cultivating.

Broth
3 cups water or light stock
2 heaped dessert spoons miso paste, or to taste
a dash of tamari

Things to go in the soup
120 g soba noodles, cooked, drained and rinsed
6 small pieces butternut squash, steamed till tender
10 small cubes silken tofu
6 dried shiitake, rehydrated in hot water
4 pieces dried black fungus, rehydrated in hot water
2 handfuls baby spinach leaves

Finishing
coriander leaves
sesame oil
chili flakes

First make the broth. Bring the water or stock to a boil, then remove from heat. In a small bowl, mix a little of the hot water with the miso until it thins out, then add this to the rest of the water. Mix, taste, and add more miso if necessary. The broth is often improved by a scant dash of tamari at this point, too.

Into each of two large bowls, put half the cooked noodles, pumpkin, tofu, shiitake, black fungus and spinach leaves. Gently pour the miso broth over, half into each bowl.  Sprinkle with coriander leaves, a few spots of sesame oil, and a pinch of chili flakes. Eat at once.

Serves 2.

Categories
chitchat lunch pasta recipes vegetarian

Our apparently regular weekend chat

I went to the Powerhouse markets with my mum this morning. She likes markets; Ted doesn’t; why didn’t I think of this obvious pairing-up before? Good call mum.

I brought back a lovely wintery haul: cavolo nero, young kale, parsley and dill, a bunch of plumping-up dutch carrots, a potkin pumpkin, Tenterfield apples, a German rye loaf, a boudin noir (plus a couple for Jean and Edwige), and two very large and meaty smoked ham hocks.

I bought the potkin in hopes that it would be something like a kabocha, the pumpkin that stole my heart away from butternut squash when I lived in Dublin. Kabocha (at least in Ireland) have dark green thick but edible skin, and intensely orange flesh that is firm and sweet. The middle-aged couple selling these pumpkins at the Powerhouse markets had two kinds on offer: “These ones are potkins, and these other ones, we don’t know what variety they are so we call them bobkins, after Bob here”. They’d never heard of kabocha but the potkins looked a plausible match so I bought one. (“How much for this little one Bob?” “Oh, about two dollars.”) Once home I checked the interwebs: many sites claim that potkins are a kabocha hybrid. Hurrah, perhaps! But alas, when I split mine, its flesh was much paler than a kabocha’s, and when I quartered, seeded and roasted it the flavour was fine but nothing spectacular. So as you can tell it’s been an emotional whirlwind of a day, pumpkin-wise, and maybe I need to have a sit down and have a glass of wine to settle myself.

Fortunately, lunch gave me something else to think about, which was emptying out various bits and pieces from the fridge so that new bits and pieces could go in. Not that much in the crisper – a few zucchini and some herbs. In the big tupperware that holds the cheese stash, there were several scraps and rinds and forgotten last chunks of various cheeses each wrapped up in paper, one of which was a small piece of Roaring Forties blue cheese that had seen better days. It was very mildly suspicious-looking on one edge, but as regular readers will know, this blog sometimes ought to be subtitled Slightly Dodgy Things I Have Eaten, so after submitting it to the taste-a-tiny-bit-it-won’t-kill-you test, I passed it as edible but for immediate consumption only. Hence this pasta, variants of which we make pretty frequently. I love the way that the zucchini cook down to a sweet, luscious softness, losing about 70% of their original volume. Even after making it a dozen times, I still doubt myself when I see the towering pile of raw zucchini. Don’t – you will regret not having more if you skimp.

Strozzapreti with zucchini, thyme and blue cheese

8 slender zucchini (why bother buying fat, watery zucchini?)
3 large brown shallots
olive oil
sea salt and black pepper
leaves from quite a few sprigs of thyme
a palmful of leaves of flat-leaf parsley
150 g strozzapreti
smallish piece of blue cheese, about 10 x 2 x 2 cm

Slice the zucchini into rounds about 2-3 mm thick. Peel and halve the shallots, and slice very finely. Heat a small glug of olive oil in a non-stick pan over moderate heat, add the zucchini, shallots, thyme, salt and pepper, and cook, stirring more or less frequently, for about 20 minutes. The zucchini will cook down until they are very, very soft. They shouldn’t pick up much, if any, colour though – turn the heat down if they start to brown more than the tiniest bit.

Meanwhile, cook the pasta, then drain it, reserving a cup of the cooking water. Toss the pasta in with the zucchini, loosening the sauce with drizzles of cooking water if needed. Toss through some chopped parsley, then serve with more parsley and crumbled cheese sprinkled on top. Stir through the cheese before eating.

Serves 2.