Pasta approved by an Italian

There’s something to national stereotypes.
You know — Germans mean potatoes, Poles mean onions.

And Italians?

Pasta.

One of our teachers is Italian. And whenever he visits, I serve pasta. Most often it’s spinach pasta — a recipe approved and loved by a real Italian (not the kind you see in tourist brochures).

Ingredients

• 1 tsp coriander
• 1 tsp cumin
• ½ tsp ground juniper
• ½–1 tsp pepper
• ¼ tsp ground nutmeg
• 1 tsp smoked salt
• 900 g frozen spinach
• 600 g frozen mushrooms
• 2 onions (200–250 g)
• 200 ml coconut cream
• 4–5 tbsp olive oil
• a pack of 150 pieces of TVP protein

Additional umami options:
soy sauce / Worcestershire sauce / Marmite

Preparation

Boil the TVP protein in water with a splash of crema balsamico and soy sauce / Worcestershire / Marmite.
Set aside until at least cooled.

Defrost the mushrooms and spinach.

Dice the onions.

Drain the TVP protein and gently squeeze out excess water.

Heat olive oil in a pan and fry the onions until golden to light brown.

Gradually add the squeezed TVP protein (so you don’t drop the temperature of the pan too much) and fry for a few minutes over low heat.

Add 2 tbsp Worcestershire sauce and 1 tbsp crema balsamico. Reduce to almost nothing over low heat, stirring constantly.

Add the mushrooms and spinach together with the liquid released during thawing.

Cook over low heat until most of the liquid evaporates.
Add the coconut cream and reduce until the sauce is thick.

Variations

You can achieve different umami profiles depending on which combination of ingredients you use — soy sauce, Worcestershire, teriyaki, Marmite, etc.

The final effect will also vary depending on the type of TVP protein you use. I usually cook large batches — 10 to 20 portions — and use two different kinds, slightly different in texture, flavor, and shape.

You can also add sun-dried tomatoes instead of mushrooms or alongside them.
I don’t use them because the Italian mentioned earlier is allergic.

Being Italian and not being able to eat tomatoes — very bad karma!

Notes

Coconut cream is not the same as coconut milk or coco cremo, which is sometimes also called coconut cream.

It's something like oat cream or soya cream

As a last resort, use half coconut milk and half oat milk.

It’s best to soak the TVP protein the evening before.
Just remember not to put it hot into the fridge.

If you use soy sauce, it’s better to replace the smoked salt with smoked paprika.

Serving

Serve with pasta cooked al dente.

Italian cuisine is a fascinating phenomenon. The dishes that the whole world now loves were originally the food of poor people in a poor country.

That’s why there is so much pasta.

In a poor country for poor people, food is expensive, but labor is cheap. And grain is one of the cheapest raw materials.

That’s why we have dishes like dumplings in Poland and Ukraine, or pizza and pasta in Italy — dishes where flour and other cheap, accessible ingredients dominate.

Meat in these dishes plays the role of a garnish, almost a seasoning, a source of umami.

Not even primarily protein — because in traditional peasant cuisine, protein came mainly from legumes and other plant foods.

The current situation in many Western countries — where eating meat every day, even among poorer people, is the norm — has nothing to do with either tradition or health.

Meat for every dinner.
And even several times a day — a cutlet for lunch, cold cuts on sandwiches for breakfast and dinner.

And even leaving aside the quality, which inevitably declines with such massive industrial production of meat and processed meats, this has little to do with how humans evolved.

Evolutionarily, we are adapted to eat very little meat, sometimes almost negligible amounts.
And we are also adapted to being a bit underfed rather than overstuffed, and to moving a lot — working physically, not sitting at computers at work and at home.

So I’m getting up from the computer.

Going to the kitchen. And for a walk.

Which I recommend to you as well.

After a long walk, dinner will taste even better.