This creamy pasta dish comes from the “Mildred’s: The Vegetarian Cookbook”.
I found a digital version of the recipe over here. Even though described as a summer dish, the creamy, saffron-infused sauce swayed us towards trying it in the middle of December.
At first, we were a bit hesitant to cook this dish as the kids don’t really like goats’ cheese, but gave it a try anyway. Many complaints were heard when we said what we would be having dinner – in increasing order of yuckiness: Chili pepper? Olives?? Goats’ cheese???. But in the end, they admitted that the sauce was okay as it was not very intensely flavored (it was marked as a 7 out of 10). They were lucky though that we withheld the quite pungent kalamata olives from their plates…
Unfortunately, the sauce itself was much blander than you would expect from the chili pepper, garlic cloves, lemon zest and saffron it had as a basis and the amount of goat’s cheese that it contained. No wonder the kids liked it…
The dish has a lot of upsides: the consistency of the sauce is creamy yet not very heavy and coated the tagliatelle nicely. Furthermore, the courgette ribbons are only cooked briefly in the heat of the sauce and therefore keep their bite, and finally, the tomato wedges and olives give it some punch. Luckily, you can tweak the sauce very quickly to adapt to your own palate.
Recipe accuracy:
The recipe is easy to follow and meant for 4-6 persons. We used half of the ingredient, and that was more than enough to feed all of us.
Suggested tweaks:
I would suggest frying a finely diced shallot together with the garlic and upping the amount of goats’ cheese by half.
Verdict: 7/10; will be made again but in a tweaked version.
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