The Recipe Room

This one’s a little more unusual, mainly due to the sprouts. It’s a vegetarian pasta dish, but it packs a very full-flavour punch! We had a large crop of Brussel sprouts on our allotment last autumn, and decided to try them in place of meat in one of our favourite dishes. We think they work a treat: the sprouts have a really strong flavour (and aroma), as do the chestnuts. We had to lessen the amount of thyme from the meat version of this dish, as otherwise there’s simply too much flavour! Give it a try and tell us what you think.

Ingredients

• 25g butter
• 2 small shallots, chopped roughly
• 150g Brussel sprouts: peel and cut an ‘x’ in the top
• 50-75g vacuum-packed ready-to-cook chestnuts, chopped into halves
• 1 tablespoon of chopped thyme
• small glass dry white wine
• 150ml double cream
• 200g tagliatelle
• salt and pepper
• grated parmesan cheese

Method

1 – Before you get the whole meal started, part-cook the Brussel sprouts: about 10 mins in very lightly salted boiling water should be enough, but it depends on the size of the sprouts. Then chop them up roughly, so that the sprout pieces are just a bit larger than the chopped chestnuts.

2 – Melt the butter in a large heavy bottomed pan, add the shallots and fry for 2 mins. Add the sprouts, chestnuts and thyme, cooking for 1 or 2 minutes (a little colour/caramelisation looks nice and adds flavour). Add the white wine and cook for 2-3 minutes to reduce. Add the cream and simmer gently for a couple of minutes to reduce further. Now is a good time for seasoning, but be careful, these ingredients already have a lot of powerful flavour!

3 – Whilst the main ingredients are cooking, start the pasta: bring sufficient lightly salted water to the boil, and cook your tagliatelle till al dente. Drain the pasta, and combine with the sauce. Check the seasoning and serve, adding grated parmesan. This dish is great with dry peppery white wine, like a Gruner Veltliner, or Gewurtztraminer.

Notes: if you don’t like sprouts, and I know quite a lot of people don’t, then instead use sausages: using Italian salciccia you can either cut them lengthways, and then roughly chop them up, or just cut slice them transversely, but a bit thinner.

Serves 2

Time: 30 mins – about 10 mins prep & 20 mins cooking

Tags: Brussel sprouts, butter, chestnuts, cream, Italian, parmesan cheese, pasta, pasta dish, shallots, tagliatelle, thyme, vegetarian, wine

This entry was posted on Wednesday, 2 May, 2012 at 10:44 am by Gianluca Dievole and is filed under Less than 1 hour, Main Courses, Meal for 2 people. You can follow any responses to this entry through the feed RSS 2.0. You can leave a comment, or make a trackback from your own blog.