Question
Ken Rubin
I know you have turned a lot of of your Italian family traditional recipes into WFPB versions. Which are the most meaningful for you?
Answer
So I think some of you know that I spend a week to 10 days, usually in September or October, on a 400-year-old farm that has a cooking school to it, and it's about 10 miles from where my grandmother lived and 10 miles the other way where my grandfather was from. So I find that anything that I make that is reminiscent of my childhood is extremely, extremely important. But my favorite dish is piselli e pasta, which is peas and pasta, and you have to use ditalini pasta. My grandmother used Del Monte canned peas because they were Italian, and she believed that she had to support any Italian company in the world. So my version of it is ditalini peas, and to make it creamy, because it must have had a thousand gallons of oil in it, I will use aquafaba, and I will use nutritional yeast. And then the other thing, growing up, sometimes if there wasn't money to buy cheese, my grandmother would take stale Italian bread and grate it, and then she would toast it on the stove and then use that instead of using a cheese. So I will sometimes add toasted bread to it as well, which to me, in my brain, sometimes it's almost as though my grandmother made that. So yes, peas and pasta is one of my favorite dishes as well.
