Source: Leila's request, grub chat, 2026-10-15 — "blanched kale pasta sauce with pasta and some kind of simple accompanying salad"
Serves: 2 + baby · ~30 min · one pot, one blender
Blanching is the whole technique. Raw kale blends bitter and dull olive-green; 90 seconds in boiling water and a cold shock makes it sweet and bright, and it stays that colour in the bowl. The sauce is never cooked again.
Ingredients
1 large bunch kale (lacinato or curly), ~8 oz / 225g leaves, stems stripped
3 garlic cloves, peeled and left whole
5 oz / 150g dry pasta — short shapes hold this sauce best
⅓ cup walnuts
¼ cup olive oil
⅓ cup pecorino or parmesan, finely grated, plus more to finish
½ lemon — juice and a little zest
½ tsp crushed chilli flakes (cooking area)
Salt and black pepper
Salad ingredients
¼ small purple cabbage, shaved as thin as you can
1 cup black cherry tomatoes, halved
2 spring onions, thinly sliced
1 tbsp olive oil, juice of ½ lemon
½ tsp sumac (cooking area), salt
Blanch and blend the sauce
Bring a large pot of well-salted water to the boil. This one pot does the kale and then the pasta.
Toast the walnuts in a dry pan over medium, 4 min, until they smell nutty. Tip them out — they keep cooking in a hot pan.
Drop the kale and the whole garlic cloves into the boiling water. 90 seconds, no longer. Lift them out with tongs or a spider and leave the water on the heat.
Straight into a bowl of ice water. This is what locks the colour in; draining into a colander will not do it.
Squeeze the kale dry in your hands, hard, in two batches. Watery kale makes watery sauce.
Blend the kale, garlic, walnuts, olive oil, lemon juice and ¼ cup of the cooking water until completely smooth, a full minute — short blending is what leaves it gritty.
Spoon out ¼ cup now for the baby, before anything else goes in.
Add the pecorino, chilli flakes, lemon zest, ½ tsp salt and plenty of black pepper. Blend 10 seconds more. Taste — it should be bright and a little sharp.
Cook the pasta and finish
Cook the pasta in the same water to just under the package time. Reserve 1 cup of the water before draining.
Off the heat, in the warm empty pot: pasta, all the sauce, a splash of pasta water. Toss hard for 30 seconds until it coats.
Never put the sauce back on the flame. Heat turns it army green and dulls the flavour. The hot pasta is all the warmth it needs.
Loosen with more pasta water until it slides. Finish with grated pecorino, a little more lemon and a drizzle of oil.
The salad
Toss the shaved cabbage with the oil, lemon juice and a good pinch of salt. Let it sit 10 minutes — it softens and turns from squeaky to crunchy-tender.
Add the tomatoes and spring onion, toss once, dust with sumac. Serve cold against the hot pasta.
Notes
Baby: the reserved ¼ cup is unsalted and uncheesed. Stir it through a few plain short noodles.
Kale stems: slice thin and blanch them 3 minutes before the leaves go in if you want to use them. Not worth it in the sauce otherwise.
The sauce keeps 3 days in the fridge with a film of oil on top, and freezes in an ice cube tray. Use it on farro or roasted vegetables, not just pasta.
Scale the pasta to 5 oz dry for two — one starchy carb each, in line with the household target.
Pine nuts instead of walnuts make it read as pesto: sweeter, buttery, almost resinous, and they blend creamier because they are softer and fattier, so the sauce comes out silkier. Walnuts are tannic and earthy and leave more texture — a heartier sauce that stands up to the pecorino and chilli. Toast pine nuts 2–3 min and do not walk away; they burn in seconds.
Almonds work too. Pistachios make it taste Persian, which is also good.