This recipe has been buried deep inside my memory for many years and found it’s way out of the rat’s nest last weekend. When you remove things pasta, rice and large wallops of mashed potato from your weekly repertoire, recipes like this sink to the bottom of your mental recipe pool like a stone. I can’t remember why this one sprang to mind but it’s a terrifically satisfying dish that combines seemingly incongruent ingredients like cream, fresh tomato, crab and ginger. It doesn’t sound like it should work but it does. You get richness in flavour from the cream, sweetness from crab and a fresh, light flavour from the ginger and tomato.
You can use any pasta you like. I used a packet of wonderfully exotic twisted tubes that I had from my delivery from Made in Italy . As for the crab, one or two tins of chunky white meat will suffice.
Creamy Tomato, Crab and Ginger Pasta Recipe
(serves 2 hungry people)
Ingredients:
Single cream, about half a cup
White wine, a very healthy splash
1 leek, sliced
1 clove of garlic, minced
1 inch of ginger, grated or finely diced
Handful of ripe baby plum tomatoes, halved
1 tbs tomato puree
1-2 tins of crab meat
1 fresh red chilli, sliced
Method:
Put your pasta on to cook, and while you wait, make the sauce.
Saute the leeks, garlic, chilli and ginger in some olive oil until softened.
Pour in the wine and tomato puree and simmering and stirring until the liquid has reduced.
Pour in the cream, crab and tomato and bring to the boil.
Turn heat down and reduce until the flavours have deepened and the sauce is creamy.
Season with salt and pepper and drain the pasta to mix with the sauce.