Lemon-y pasta is the perfect “yay, warm weather” dinner. It’s bright, zingy, and lends itself well to al fresco dining.
Today, we’ve got an unbeetable addition to your lemon pasta recipe repertoire: Lemon-Beet Sauce and Fusilli with Peas and Poppy Seeds from Cara Mangini’s new book The Vegetable Eater: The New Playbook for Cooking Vegetarian.
She describes this dish as “an homage to the celebrated beet- and ricotta-stuffed ravioli with butter sauce and poppy seeds from the venerable Al Di La Trattoria in Park Slope, Brooklyn.”
Despite its fine-dining inspiration, this recipe is actually quite simple to make. Roasting the beets takes the most time, but it’s pretty hands-off. If you’re short on time, you can use 1 to 1 1/4 pounds precooked and peeled beets instead. (Saves you a bit of mess, too.)
The beets and the ricotta make for a velvety sauce. Not only do beets add a lovely color and texture to the sauce, they also pack in the nutritional benefits. They’re loaded with vitamins and minerals—like folate, copper, and potassium—and other good-for-you nutrients like fiber and antioxidants. Ricotta cheese is high in protein and calcium. (Plus, it contains all nine essential amino acids.)
The richness of the sauce is balanced by the brightness of the fresh lemon, arugula, chives, and peas.
Get the full recipe below.
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