Quick and Easy Spring Pasta with Lemony Ricotta and Brown Butter Asparagus

Light and creamy and ready in the time it takes for the pasta to cook

Sometimes only a gorgeous bowl of pasta will do. And a dish that comes together in the time is takes for the pasta to cook is always a good idea on a weeknight. When you just don’t have the energy for something more elaborate, a simple “almost” one pan pasta dish is exactly what’s in order.

This pasta is light and fresh with all the flavours of Spring. It’s delicate, which is not a word I often use for pasta but this one is and it’s just very simple. And so often I think simple is best.

You get the pasta on to cook and then you make the sauce. And by “the sauce” I simply mean you pan fry some vegetables in bubbling butter and then tip these over a pot of ricotta. This is incidentally a lovely thing on its own - often for a weekend lunch I will do this and serve it just as a warm ricotta salad type of thing. It’s so easy and goes with everything. But back to the pasta - once the vegetables have tumbled onto the ricotta you just mash it all together (a seriously satisfying thing to do by the way), and add some of the pasta cooking water as you mix. I love the creaminess from the ricotta against the slightly nutty brown butter vegetables. I use a whole garlic clove in this recipe which then get’s scooped out later and this just means it all gets kissed with garlic but the flavour is very light and delicate. There is lemon throughout and lots of black pepper and parmesan.

You can really use any shape pasta you like. There are “rules” about what shape is best suited to which sauce or ingredient but really I think you just need to do what feels right to you / what you have in the cupboard. I love this equally with a long strand of linguine as I do with a rigatoni. Orecchiette is a favourite of mine at the moment as I love how the little ears catch the sauce.

This is very low effort and very high reward and really what could be better than that?

The full recipe is below for paid subscribers (along with a handy PDF version). You also get access to helpful notes on the recipe in case you want to make it vegetarian friendly, or you’re feeding more people and want to scale up easily. Perhaps you’re feeding the whole family? It’s all covered in the Notes.

I really want this newsletter to be your go-to resource when you don’t know what to cook for supper so I put a lot of energy into the Notes section to make it as helpful as possible. Cooking isn’t about following a recipe exactly, it’s about using it as inspiration, seeing what you have in the fridge and making it your own so I’ve got lots of tips about how you can adapt it.

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This recipe serves 2, but very easily scaled up for more.