Recipe: 15-Minute Broken Pasta with Lemony Crab & Courgette

Because the recipes I usually post tend to lean towards the weeknight wonder, I know I have a real deficit of dishes you can serve up as a starter (so, they look impressive but are actually deceptively simple) when you have people over. So, today I’ve got a really quick (you can get it on the table in less than 15 minutes, so perfect for entertaining) and easy pasta dish for you today which yes, can serve two as a light meal (do serve it with a crisp, cold bottle of white wine), but looks super impressive divided between for of you as a starter.

There are two key elements to this dish: the no-cook sauce, and the broken pasta pieces. The sauce is really just courgette ribbons (use a vegetable peeler to make them look all fancy like this), lightly marinated in lemon, sea salt and chilli with a bit of fresh picked crab meat thrown in at the last minute, and the pasta may look like it has been handmade from the pages of a fancy cookbook, but it is really just dried lasagna sheets, broken up before cooking. I like things to be a little less than perfect, but if you want clean shards, buy fresh lasagna sheets and cut them with a sharp knife first. They will also require even less cooking time, so really what you’ll be doing is just putting together a load of ingredients on a pretty plate!

I put this dish together as part of a feature for Refinery 29 on how to cook dinner for friends when you’re not at all confident in the kitchen – entertaining should not be difficult and stressful! For the recipe, my recipe for Sheet Pan Chicken Fajitas and my recipe for my Stupidly Simple Smoked Salmon & Pea Quiche, head on over!

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