Recipe of the Month: Pasta Romesco With Spinach

Last month, I got an e-mail from my dad with the subject line, "Delicious vegan recipe." This is not a phrase my dad utters often, so it caught my attention. He said he had signed up for an email newsletter from the Washington Post that delivers "vegetarian or near-vegetarian recipes" to your inbox, and this was the latest one. He found it not only very tasty, but "surprisingly satisfying, for a meal with no meat, fish, or cheese."

The attached recipe was Pasta Romesco With Spinach: a pasta dish with an interesting sauce made from roasted red peppers, roasted almonds, tomato paste, salt, and smoked Spanish paprika. All this gets whirred together in the blender and tossed with pasta (the recipe calls for fusilli, but says spaghetti is also acceptable), spinach sauteed with garlic (it calls for baby spinach, but my dad said chopped adult spinach worked just fine), and fresh basil. My dad also modified the Washington Post recipe by cutting the olive oil, as he is wont to do; he used just one tablespoon to cook the spinach and didn't add any to the sauce, instead thinning it with the reserved liquid from the red peppers.

Well, as luck would have it, the most exotic ingredient in this dish, the smoked Spanish paprika, was something we happened to have on hand. Brian had picked some up on a whim on our latest visit to Penzeys, and he still hadn't really thought of a good way to use it, so this seemed like the perfect opportunity. And, since we're well into the harvest season now, we had plenty of fresh basil in the garden. The only ingredients we had to buy were the roasted red peppers, which we found at Trader Joe's, and the spinach, which we picked up for a buck at Shop Rite.

Since my dad recommended the recipe based on his own modified version, we decided to go with that for our first rendition of it. We substituted linguine, the only long pasta we had in the house, for the fusilli and thinned the sauce with the juice from the peppers. Despite this addition, the sauce was still rather thick, and it took a bit of work to get it to coat the noodles. Brian thinks it would probably work better with the full amount of olive oil, so he's inclined to try it that way next time.

And there will certainly be a next time, because this pasta, as advertised, was very good. The smoked Spanish paprika is a key ingredient; there's only a teaspoon of it in there, but it lends a distinct, smoky undertone to the entire dish, complementing the mellow flavor of the roasted peppers and the earthiness of the almonds. Although the recipe says it only makes three servings, we were able to get dinner for both of us out of it, plus a lunch each from the leftovers. And despite the shrill injunction in the last line of the recipe to "serve immediately," it was just as good the next day.

So this little baby is definitely going into our regular repertoire. In fact, we're going to make a point of keeping a jar of roasted peppers on hand in the pantry from now on, so that we can make it whenever we feel inclined. So we'll add that to our list of things to pick up whenever we hit a Trader Joe's, along with almond milk and toilet paper.