I absolutely love the walnut butter I first tried making recently, either honey smoked, as in the original, or plain. Convinced it would make a lovely pasta sauce, I had a little play.

Asda don’t sell sun dried tomatoes, so I’ve priced it at Tesco

Creamy Walnut Pasta Sauce

140g Walnut butter or walnuts 200g/£2.40
125ml Double cream 600ml/£1.60
25g Sun dried tomato, 100g/£1.89
Piece of preserved lemon 100g/£2.69

Total cost £2.61. 4 portions = 65p each

Total nutrition 1640 calories, 158g fat, 12g carbs, 28g protein

If you have walnut pieces, you’ll need to turn them into walnut butter first. Put the nuts into a food processor and whizz until they become butter. This may take several minutes, but just keep going and it will happen eventually. You might need to scrape the mixture down with a spatula every now and then.

Then simply whizz all ingredients together and keep in the fridge. Will keep for a few days. I don’t know if it will freeze as I haven’t tried it.

Verdict

I had this with a small amount of pasta, 50g dried, to minimise the carbs, and lots of veg – strips of carrot, spinach and a bit of sweet corn from a tin already opened. It was really good. The tomato came through well, and the preserved lemon gave a delicious under flavour. I think I would even use two pieces rather than one next time.

If you want to do LCHF, use a small amount of pasta and be generous with the sauce. 50g of value pasta adds 3p per portion. Value carrot and iceberg perhaps another 10p, so a total of 78p, just about doable in £1 a day.