On Capers

With lemon on pasta!

Happy Friday and welcome to the weekly recipe post for paid subscribers. On Tuesday, all subscribers will receive a post on my latest travel obsession, home exchanges. As always, check out more of my work (or consider booking my photography services!) here.

I will be honest with you: between kitchen renovations and the flu, it’s been a slow few weeks of cooking in my house. All that is behind us now, thank god, and in the last few days, I’ve settled back into the routine of figuring out what to cook for dinner, something that grounds me in a way I can’t really express. It is making me feel 100% more human than on the nights that I was microwaving rice, and I’m trying to enjoy every moment of this new appreciation for an every day task.

Tomorrow night, I’m making this recipe is for a lemon caper pasta with peas that I've been making since 2018. As with many of the recipes that I developed, tested, and re-tested, every time I make this one, I find myself substituting ingredients here and there based on what’s languishing in the back of my refrigerator.

I’ve written about this before, a lot, but it’s a constant challenge to me: I love adaptable recipes and cooking, and I firmly believe that that approach is the key to reducing waste (both money and food!) in the kitchen. But it’s hard to teach that, especially in the form of a written recipe. Often, so often, I cook based on hunches and guesses, and because I’ve been doing this professionally for five years now, I’m usually right. Sometimes I’m not, but I can cook my way out of most of those situations.

But too often, relying on recipes limits people in the kitchen. Learning to cook with what you have on hand will help you become more intuitive in the kitchen AND reduce the amount of random, weird leftovers that you throw away every week. So, again this week, I’m giving you a basic recipe. I'll tell you what I use, and then I'll recommend some other ingredients that I think would go well and set you free to create your own version of this recipe. Sound good? GREAT.

Lemon Caper Pasta with Peas

As the name suggests, the flavor of this sauce comes from the tart lemon juice and the brine-y capers. If you don't have capers on hand, you can sub in some olives, a dry white wine, sun dried tomatoes, or marinated artichoke hearts. Basically, whatever you're pairing with the lemons and greens needs to be the big flavor driver and pack a punch.

The body of the sauce that I make also incorporates lightly sautéed peas and wilted spinach. I almost always use peas here because they're the right texture and flavor to carry the sauce and add some interest to the pasta dish. If you don't have peas, you could sub in roasted broccoli, double the spinach or kale, and even lima beans (just, uh, don't add them before you blend the sauce. Yuck.).

I added the spinach to this version because I had a pack of it that was going bad in the back of my fridge. You could do the same with kale, arugula, or even a ton of soft herbs. Get crazy!