Romesco pasta

Romesco pasta is a super easy pasta dish that's perfect for any night. Spanish romesco sauce is packed with tasty flavor from tomato, nuts and more. Keep things simple with just the sauce or add in vegetables, chicken or whatever you choose.

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Pasta is one of our go-to meals for a busy night, as I'm sure it is for many people. Sometimes I'll make a sauce ahead, like Bolognese, so it's quick to put together. Others come together in mere minutes like crab pasta, lemon mascarpone pasta or one of our big favorites, arugula pesto. 

But I do find we can fall into a few small favorites and little more. So it's always good to mix things up. Plus, sometimes when I make romesco sauce I find it's more than we can use with vegetables first time around. This Spanish-inspired pasta is the perfect solution. 

What is romesco sauce?

Romesco sauce is from Catalunya in the Northeast of Spain. It has been around for centuries and was apparently first created by fishermen to liven up their meals. It's from Valls in the Tarragona region which is the area that I lived for a year and I have many delicious memories of enjoying it with fire-roasted vegetables as part of a calçotada. 

You might see some quick romesco recipes that are predominantly red pepper but the base is actually roast tomatoes with some dried nora pepper in there and only maybe a little red pepper. Then alongside the tomato you have nuts, garlic, toasted breadcrumbs and olive oil that all add lots of delicious flavor and texture. 

Yes, the more traditional sauce takes a little more time to make, but it's worth it for all those layers of flavor. Once made, you can then store it in the fridge for a few days to use as and when you need it, in various ways.

As well as being a great sauce for dipping vegetables in, it's also a versatile sauce to use in cooking. While made more in with the dish rather than separately, it's the base for Catalan fish stew, romesco de peix. You can serve it with chicken, fish, and a range of vegetables. Then as here, it works really well with pasta, too.

While I love the flavors of the homemade sauce, which you can prepare ahead as I say, you can also make this with ready-made sauce too, if you can find it, to make things even easier.

Ways to vary this dish

While this at it's most basic is essentially just the sauce mixed through cooked pasta, you can vary it in a few ways. The main one being that you can make a few additions, such as:

• cooked chicken such as leftover roast or poached chicken;
• pieces of chorizo or serrano ham, chopped into small chunks;
• cooked shrimp or you could use a mix of cooked seafood;
• cooked vegetables like asparagus, peas, zucchini or mushroom, chopped into bite-size pieces as needed;
• chopped raw spinach or arugula, wilted in the heat of the pasta, or some chopped cherry tomatoes.

Since the sauce is Spanish, the natural choice to top is some grated manchego cheese. But you could instead use some parmesan, pecorino or even cheddar. Or skip the cheese and just savor the sauce!

This romesco pasta is a super easy pasta meal that's perfect for a busy night. It takes mere minutes to put together, is easy to adapt with different additions, and is packed with tasty flavor either way. Be sure to add it to your easy meal list soon.

Try these other tasty pasta dishes:

• Pasta alla Norma (eggplant tomato pasta)
• Fregola with clams (an easy and tasty Sardinian dish)
• Squid ink pasta with shrimp and tomato (another quick and easy dish)
• Bacon sundried tomato pasta with spinach
• Plus get more main course recipe ideas in the archives

See some of my favorite cooking tools and ingredients in the Caroline's Cooking Amazon store. 

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