Pistachio Romesco Sauce

When you are looking for a tasty, rich sauce to add some depth of flavour to an SP meal, this version of the Spanish dish of Romesco, works a treat! Traditionally Romesco consists of a combination of roasted peppers, almonds, garlic and tomato with one of my fave ingredients, smoked paprika. 

My issue with the traditional recipe for SP days was I found was that 20g of flaked almonds, the allowance as one of the Healthy Extra B options, didn't seem to make enough of an impact on the taste and the traditional recipe usually includes a lot of olive oil. My version replaces almonds with 15 of the 35 shelled pistachio nuts you can have for HEB (this is enough to add a savoury and slightly aromatic nutty taste) It also leaves you an additional 20 pistachios for the day which you can use on salads or toppings for other meals. 

The smoky taste of the sauce makes it a great friend of the Cauliflower Steaks recipe, but it also goes really well over spiralised vegetables, used as a base sauce for SP pizzas like my Sausage Patty Pizzas and even spread cold on Finn Crisp crackers or as a sandwich filling (trust me here!) 

As with all recipes and meal plans on the blog I have highlighted the protein sources (P foods) in red, the speed (S) foods in green, healthy extra allowances in blue and syns, with syn values in brackets in orange. 

Pistachio Romesco Sauce

Makes 4 portions as a side-dish - syn free if using your HEB for the pistachios (4 syns for the lot if not)

2 red, orange or yellow peppers (whichever combination you like)

2 cloves of garlic, crushed

15 shelled pistachio nuts 

2 tsp balsamic vinegar

1 tsp smoked paprika

Ground seasalt

2 tsp tomato puree

Handful of fresh flat-leaf parsley

Pre-heat an oven to 160 degrees Electric Fan / 180 Electric / Gas mark 4.

Halve, de-seed the peppers and roast on a large oven tray sprayed with oil spray for 30 minutes. 

Put the pistachios into a blender or food processor and blitz to fine pieces. 

Next add the parsley and seasalt, which draws out the moisture from the parsley effectively.

Finally, add all the other ingredients into the blender / food processor and blend until smooth. Add a splash of cold water if you feel the texture is too thick but avoid diluting it too much. 

You can then gently heat this through in a pan on a low-heat before serving. Avoid boiling rapidly, as this brings out the aroma of the balsamic vinegar more prominently. Whilst the balsamic is key to the depth of flavour in the sauce, for me this alters the balance of flavours too much.