My friend Tom shares a recipe from Procida, an island off Italy, well known for lemons …
This is the perfect recipe to make on holiday. I styled his book Cool Pasta and fell in love with his style of cooking. He, like me, feels as passionate about cooking while away, so I love to see what he manages to make wherever he goes.
“Before I unpack anything at all, I’m in the kitchen taking stock. ‘They’ve got a moulin! We’ll have to make tomato sauce,’ ‘Who in their right mind doesn’t own a grater?’ You can almost taste my wife’s disinterest from the other room. With holiday kitchen inventories, you win some, you lose some, and herein lies the romance of it all; you align your holiday cooking ambitions with the tools at your disposal — the culinary limitations always feel strangely liberating.
We were staying on Procida, an island off Italy, for the lemons. Doped up on the volcanic minerals present in the island’s black sands, they grow to the size of melons, are sweeter, brighter-tasting, and have deep white piths known as the ‘bread’ of the lemon that eat like lemon-scented courgettes. The island produces its own brand of lemon pesto (pestolimò) which you can find on restaurant menus with pasta, grilled fish, with little fried crocché and so on. The lemon salad (that’s right) is a hyperlocal delicacy. I checked out the ingredients on the back of the pesto jar and set my sights on what would be the best beach-pasta experience of my life (so far anyway). The hand blender I’d found at the flat on arrival and had earmarked for making the pesto obviously turned out to be broken, so I bought a new one from the little alimentari. I wonder if it’s been used since?”
TOM JACKSON’S LEMON PESTO PASTA SALAD
Ingredients
Serves 2-4
• 50g almonds
• 30g pine nuts
• 1 large bunch basil
• 6 sprigs mint
• 4 sprigs parsley
• The rind and juice of 1 lemon from Procida (or one good quality unwaxed lemon, white pith removed)
• 2 garlic cloves, roughly sliced
• Olive oil
• 80g parmesan
• A handful of fine green beans, trimmed
• 2 or 3 small, firm courgettes
• A small bunch of friarielli (or tenderstem broccoli)
• 400g pennette or your favourite pasta salad shape
• Salt
Method
1. Lightly toast the almonds and pine nuts in a pan at medium heat, then cool completely.
2. Pick the herbs (tender parsley stalks are fine).
3. Using a blender, blitz the lemon rind with the lemon juice, garlic and a small ice cube to a pulpy lemon cream.
4. Decant some of the lemon cream in order to give you control over how lemon-y your pesto will be (you can add, but you can’t take away!).
5. Add all of the herbs and blitz roughly, then add the cooled nuts and blitz again. Add a long glug of olive oil, more lemon cream (to taste), then add the cheese, more oil and salt, to taste. It should be rich, perfumed and creamy.
6. Blanch the green beans and broccoli in salty boiling water until just tender, then refresh in iced water and drain well (reserving the cooking water for the pasta).
7. Cut the courgettes into small, irregular chunks. Boil the pasta one minute shy of the full time on the packet, then quickly refresh under cold running water and drain very well.
8. Toss the pasta with the pesto, adding as much as you feel you need, then add the beans, greens, courgettes, a few more whole herbs and toss again. Box it up, then hit the beach!
SEE MORE: A 10 Step Recipe For The Perfect Panna Cotta With A Twist
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