Meera Sodha’s cooking is borderless. In her new cookbook, Dinner, kimchi is folded into spaghetti, and risotto is dialled up with Marmite and crispy chilli butter. They sit alongside recipes for laksa, kitchari (a traditional Ayurvedic dish) and a riff on the classic dim sum turnip cake. But every recipe has two things in common: they’re all vegetarian (often vegan), and they’re all dinner main courses.
The book was born of a time when Sodha, a UK Guardian food columnist and recipe writer, lost interest in cooking. After months of avoiding the kitchen, she eventually committed to cooking only dishes she felt like eating – and those are the dishes found in Dinner. “They are the recipes that have in part (alongside a lot of therapy and support) given me back a sense of myself, and are what I really love to cook in the kitchen,” she writes.
This recipe is one of those that helped coax Sodha back to the stove. It’s a spin on US chef Joshua McFadden’s viral kale pasta sauce, which uses a whopping 450 grams of kale. “It’s impressive on many levels: the volume of green, the simplicity and the excellent flavour,” writes Sodha. “I’ve made it many times, losing the parmesan but adding some fennel seeds, chilli and miso instead. Like all the best recipes, it has taken on new life in my kitchen and, with thanks to Joshua, here’s my version.”
You’ll need a blender and a very large pot (around five litres) with a lid for this recipe.
Meera Sodha’s miso butter greens pasta
Serves 4
Preparation time: 10 minutes
Cooking time: 45 minutes
Ingredients
60g unsalted butter, vegan or dairy
5 cloves of garlic, chopped
½ tsp fennel seeds
½ tsp chilli flakes
100g broccoli, chopped
400g cavolo nero, leaves stripped and sliced
¾ tsp salt
2½ tbsp white miso paste
3 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
500g orecchiette
Chilli oil, or extra-virgin olive oil, to finish
Method
Melt the butter in a saucepan on a medium heat. When it’s bubbling, add the garlic, fennel seeds and chilli flakes, and fry, stirring, for 2 to 3 minutes, until the garlic smell changes from raw to cooked and a bit like garlic bread.
Add the broccoli, cavolo nero, salt and 250ml of water, stir (this will be challenging, but believe in yourself), cover, turn down the heat to medium-low and cook, stirring every few minutes, for 8 to 10 minutes, until the greens have wilted and become tender.
Scrape all the contents of the cavolo nero pan into a blender or food processor, add the miso and olive oil, and blend to a smooth sauce, scraping down the sides as necessary; add a little water, if needed, to create a silky-smooth sauce (I add about 4 tbsp).
Rinse out the greens pot, fill with water (do not salt it: miso is already quite salty, and you can always adjust the seasoning later) and bring to a boil. Cook the pasta according to the packet instructions and, when it’s got a minute to go, gently lower a large mug into the water and scoop out a mugful of the starchy cooking water.
Drain the pasta, return it to the pot, add the sauce and toss with around 6 to 8 tbsp of the cooking water to get it to a consistency you like. Taste and add salt, if need be.
Spoon out on to a serving platter and drizzle over with chilli oil or extra virgin olive oil.
Excerpt from Dinner by Meera Sodha, published by Penguin Random House, RRP $55.
