An ode to the end of summer

The end of summer should be a season on its own, right? It’s my favorite for sure, and to celebrate it I’m sharing a recipe.

Over the years, and the more I became absorbed in the cooking world, the concept of a recipe brings up mixed feelings. While I do see the point and the convenience of having a recipe and following it, I also see an obstacle, a restriction every time a recipe is involved in my cooking process. Most of what I cook doesn’t really come from a recipe, it comes from convenience. If it works, I might repeat it, maybe tweak it and then turn it into a recipe.

This time, I had just spent the morning surfing, I was hungry, it was hot, and I didn’t want to wait a long time to have a deliciously comforting and nourishing meal. At first sight, a can of sweet corn and a courgette do not look like the most delicious lunch. Surely, I could have chopped and sautéed the courgette, added the corn some herbs and made it into a nourishing salad, but that wouldn’t have looked very comforting and satisfying. Pasta definitely screams comforting but I didn’t have it at home and it felt a bit heavy anyway. Plus, even if I had it, it still takes a while – around 15min - to boil the water and cook the pasta. I was 15-minutes-is-too-long-to-wait kind of hungry. So, I drained the corn from the can, placed it in a small pot with a splash of plant-based milk and brought it to a boil. In the meantime, I grabbed my mandoline slicer and attached a special cutter to make linguini-sized courgette noodles, which I seasoned and quickly sautéed in some olive oil, all the while pouring the hot corn, with a sprinkle of nutritional yeast, salt, pepper and olive oil in a blender. It took me listening to Nirinjan Kaur’s Chattr Chakkr Vartee to get to this point, after which I only had to pour the sauce over the noodles and sprinkle with chopped mint and coriander and some forgotten roasted pine nuts I had in the fridge. 

It completely exceeded my expectations of a deliciously comforting and nourishing meal: it was all that, plus light, creamy and fresh, and it looked like a sort of healthy carbonara – if there were such a thing. And if I hadn’t been asked for a recipe I might have just left it like that. But no, I decided to repeat it, and tweak it, and turn it into a recipe. 

 A little note on corn

Loved by birds, kids and half of any cinema audience; hated by the other half, and neglected by everyone else - unless you live in the Americas, where you have access to incredible varieties of corn - it has recently come to my attention that most people might like corn more than they want to admit or even realize, myself included. To make corn more appealing it needs a change of scenery though, or a make-over. Like moving it away from grated carrots and canned tuna, and having it mingling with Feta cheese, roasted hazelnuts and mint. Using it less whole and more blended, to show off its soothing pale yellow color and its rich, creamy texture, which was exactly what I aimed for with this quick cooking experiment.

The recipe trade-off: a bit more sophistication requires a bit more time and effort

I tried to keep the simplicity of the original dish, but the resemblance to a creamy carbonara was just too loud to ignore, so I started working around that, keeping out everything that was green, so no courgette peel (the yellow ones would work perfectly here) and no herbs, and adding some umami to make up for the bacon. Tiny slow roasted cherry tomatoes seemed like the perfect candidate to complete this end of summer trio of courgette – corn – tomato. Apart from the slow roasted tomatoes, which you can forget about in a low temperature oven for a few hours or make it ahead, and the additional step of peeling the courgette, everything else was kept simple and straightforward. Maybe the creamy corn sauce could be even tastier if blended with a sautéed onion, or if the corn comes out of a grilled cobb, but I’ll leave those extra steps for you to try it and let me know if it’s worth it or not.

Summertime Carbonara

For the slow roasted tomatoes:
250g cherry tomatoes
A drizzle of olive oil
Salt & pepper

Pre-heat the oven to 130ºC. Cut the cherry tomatoes in half and place them cut side up on a baking dish. Drizzle the olive oil and season with salt and pepper. Roast for 2h, until they've nicely caramelized in their own juices. Reserve at room temperature until ready to use or store them in the fridge in case you're making this step a day or two in advance.

For the corn Carbonara:
2 courgettes, medium size
1 jar or can of sweet corn (230g), drained
6 tbsp plant-based milk (I used unsweetened almond milk)
3 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp nutritional yeast (optional)
A squeeze of lemon juice
Salt and pepper to taste
1 handful of toasted pine nuts, finely ground*

Peel the courgettes and cut them into thin linguini-like strips using a mandoline slicer. Reserve them in the fridge until ready to use. Place the drained sweet corn in the blender with the plant-based milk, lemon juice, salt, pepper and nutritional yeast, if using. Blend very well until completely smooth. With the blender motor still running, pour the olive oil slowly in so that it emulsifies with the corn cream. Place the courgette linguini in a large skillet over medium heat. Season with salt and let it soften for 1-2min. Add the corn cream and stir well, until the courgette linguini is completely coated with the cream and everything is perfectly warmed. Finally, add the roasted tomatoes and serve immediately with freshly ground pepper and the ground pine nuts.

*I grind mine in a coffee grinder

Serves 2