Make This: Pasta with Peas and Smoked Trout

Easy cooking from the cupboard and the freezer

In my early post-college years, I purchased a cookbook by Nancy Silverton, which highlighted an approach I’ve long championed in this newsletter: cooking from your pantry. As unsexy as it sounds, that kind of cooking - using shelf-stable ingredients (bagged, jarred, boxed, or canned) from the cupboard or freezer - appealed to me then and appeals to me now.

This dish is just that - dried pasta, tinned fish, frozen peas - all shelf (or freezer) stable ingredients I always have on hand.

The combination of peas and bacon inspired this dish. The sweetness of peas, picked at their peak and arrested in the freezer, combined with smoky bacon, is a marriage that just makes sense. It reminds me of a favorite dish, the Pea & Ham Soup from The Hind’s Head in Bray, Heston Blumenthal’s country pub, where we hosted our rehearsal dinner.

Since I rarely have bacon on hand, I swerved left and plucked a tin of fish from my pantry: the smoked trout from Minnow. If canned tuna (another pantry ingredient I love to use in pasta) is “chicken of the sea,” smoked trout is the bacon. We keep it stocked as it appeals to everyone in the family and makes for an easy addition to any meal.

This dish really is a small and simple thing: three pantry items, plus olive oil, garlic, and shallot, and you’ve hit a home run.