「枝豆とカッテージチーズパスタ」

Today’s light, easy, quick and yummy pasta dish – featuring green soybeans pesto and cottage cheese!

Edamame? It is undeniably always a good time to grab some edamame pods and eat them non-stop, always.

In Japan, edamame are a popular snacking choice, often served with cold beer and other alcoholic drinks in pubs and izakaya restaurants. These green young soy beans full of flavor can be actually used for other dishes too – for today’s recipe, we will use them to make a simple and light dish: edamame and cottage cheese pasta.

To be quite honest, I got that idea of making pasta with edamame + creamy sauce from a restaurant that I go every now and then in Yokohama. They used mayonnaise and wasabi as base for their sauce – however, that combination overpowers the freshness of the dish – and I quite wanted something that felt lighter. I attempted few combinations for a new recipe and that’s how we ended up with the idea of an edamame and cottage cheese pasta.

This dish does not take any effort to make, a bit of elbow grease to mash the garlic and the edamame but nothing particularly super hard to do. Feels particularly good as a quick summer meal when you serve the dish cold!

1. 200g of pasta (I used tagliarini but spaghetti should work too)
2. 100g of fresh cottage cheese
3. 50g of cooked edamame
4. Half garlic thumb
5. 1tbsp of extra virgin olive oil
6. Grated parmesan for topping

1. Cook the pasta. Reserve it.
2. Using a mortar and pestle, grind the garlic and half of the edamame portion.
3. Add olive oil and mix to combine.
4. Move the contents to another bowl then combine with cottage cheese and the remaining edamame.
5. Mix the bowl contents with the pasta (hot or cold) and serve the dish with grated parmesan.

Add a dash of wasabi to the sauce if you want to try giving it a strong but refreshing kick.

Serve this dish as soon as you combine the sauce with the pasta for best results.

You may add thinly sliced nori as an extra topping/decoration.