Wednesday 28 December 2011

Festivus pasta! (Bacon, sprouts, Fir tree, sage - a cracker)

Fashionably smoked lardons with a Christmas tree flavour:
Beloved sprouts and the white parts of one leek:
Shred on a mandolin.  Whoever's nicked my finger-guard, the joke's over...
Fry the lardons for about 8 minutes on a gentle heat to render some of the fat.  Then remove the lardons and fry the sprouts and leeks in the aforementioned fat.  After about 5 minutes, add a thinly sliced clove of garlic, then a couple of minutes later add a small slosh of white wine.
Far too good a wine for cooking but it's all I had open.
I thought a thin spaghetti-style pasta would mirror the shredded veg nicely, so I chose these bad boys, not least because I love the packaging.  Well I do love the packaging from the front:
However! the view from the side put a downer on my vermicelli experience:
Since when is 2 ounces of pasta an acceptable portion size?  Perhaps when it's genuinely a first course, Italian style.  However I think the average sensible weight for a main pasta is 100g uncooked.  Nowadays I see a lot of recipes trying to nudge you down to 75g.  If I had my way, I'd go 150g every time.  So according to this packaging I'm eating for 3.  Like I didn't already feel guilty after my Christmas Day and Boxing Day gorges?

Anyway, cook the pasta.  Add a squeeze of lemon juice to the sprout / bacon mix, then combine, with a touch of fresh sage, parsley, and parmesan.
Totally delicious, sweet, tender, melting, great texture combo... 
A perfectly simple, sexy, seasonal, secular supper.  (Try saying that after a bottle of Gavi di Gavi di Gavi...)

Sunday 28 August 2011

Rigatoni with merguez and tomato sauce

Finally!  A return to meat, and a pretty delicious return at that.  If you like spice, meat, tomatoes and easy recipes, this is the one for you.  It takes about 3% effort, but you do need an hour, and a magimix or blender.

It is half of a very lazy adaptation of a Mario Batali recipe, rather romantically named Mint love letters with spicy lamb sausage.

I would happily marry a man who sent me love letters like Mario's - delicate yet plump ravioli, stuffed with the sweetest, richest combo of pea, mint, double cream and parmesan, smothered in a spicy tomato sausage sauce.  Seriously what is not to love?  However, as you will see from the above link, Mario's recipe is also a labour of love, and one I had neither time nor ability to execute.  Instead I left out the pea ravioli part and focussed on the tomato and spicy sausage sauce.

I bought the nicest merguez sausages I could find - from London's sexiest butcher Jack O Shea, whose counter at Selfridges is amazing.  The guy who served me advised that normally these sausages have coriander but not today - which suited me fine.  I was looking for a spicy, salty, fatty lamb hit, without any further complication.

Rigatoni with merguez sausage and tomato sauce

Serves 3, would have stretched to 4 at a push

300g merguez sausage - 2 per person
2 x pots of M&S roast tomato sauce
400g rigatoni
parmesan and parsley

1.  Cut your sausages into discs about 1cm wide.
2. In a non-stick pan, fry very gently on a low heat for about 15 minutes.  Skim all the fat that comes off during this stage - there'll be loads and it isn't the prettiest.
3. Add two pots of M&S roast tomato sauce, or any basic delicious rich, sweet tomato sauce that has onions and garlic in it.
4.  Let simmer very very gently for an hour, skimming fat off every 20 minutes or so.  This isn't liposuction - you don't have to remove every last fat cell; after all, the fat is where the flavour is.  Just skim off the really overt bits every now and again.

5. Allow to cool for a few minutes so no one gets hurt.  Then put it all in the magimix and whizz till it looks like this - 30 seconds should do it.

6. In the mean time, boil your pasta - in this case rigatoni, or De Cecco's Rigatoni no. 24 to be precise.
Such a pleasurable shape to eat.  Ridged outsides to lovingly trap your sauce, beautiful curlicued edges and a pleasingly substantial length.

7.  Drain the pasta, add a tiny glug of really good olive oil, then combine with the sauce, decorate with parmesan and a bit of parsley.

This, right here, is everything I ever want in a pasta: spicy, hearty, meaty, rich sweet tomato, melting salty parmesan, a tiny bit of fresh green to wake it all up and a sauce and pasta shape that were made for each other. 

Tuesday 16 August 2011

Fusilli with dried porcini, roast tomato and cream

I've said it before and I'll say it again: I have the palette of a peasant.  I would happily never eat a truffle for the rest of my life, ditto caviar, saffron and super-fatty tuna.

On the above basis, porcini are a mushroom I feel entirely ambivalent about.  However I had a demanding vegetarian round for dinner (so many vegetarian friends at the moment, need to rectify) and a handful (13g to be precise) of very out of date dried porcini to use up.
The above reminds me of what my skin sometimes looks like after a night out these days :-(

Anyway, the following is very loosely based on a recipe in the River Cafe little pasta book - but I took huge liberties, as follows:  I soaked the above 13g in around 50ml of water for about an hour, after which they looked a little perkier.
I sliced the mushrooms, keeping hold of the brown mushroom water, then fried two cloves of sliced garlic in butter and olive oil.  Seriously, isn't the smell of garlic frying in butter one of the top five kitchen smells?  Then I added the mushrooms for a couple of minutes, then added in the mushroom water till it evaporated:
Chucked in a bunch of very ripe cherry tomatoes, realised I didn't have enough, so added an M&S roast tomato intense stir through sauce (more of which in the next post.)
and then probably around 150ml / a very generous dollop of single cream:
and finally some parmesan, atop some fusilli.
And now I think I finally sort of get porcini.  The finished pasta was really really delicious.  Creamy and comforting and sweet, rich and earthy and tinged with the feeling that summer is over and autumn is on its way. 

Fusilli worked well - the creamy tomato sauce clinging to the spirals and the mushroom and tomato pieces providing nice little interludes.   Fusilli's such a friendly pasta.   It lets your teeth meet in the middle like a dental high five. 

Monday 8 August 2011

Tagliatelle with tomato, chilli, garlic and cream - or why guilt is a waste of time

Here's the thing.

When you've had a long hard day at work and all you want to do is have a curry, you should have a curry.

What you should not do is:

i) feel guilty about eating a curry when it's only Monday and you didn't go for that run...

ii) try to recreate the excitement of curry through the medium of pasta, by chucking in loads of chilli and garlic and not enough else.

Actually pasta with chilli and garlic would have been fine, but I attempted some tomato technique, as per Italian guru Marcella Hazan.

Marcella Hazan is brilliant; the fault was mine.   She says that when using fresh tomatoes you should either blanche and peel them (too tired) or put in a covered pan for ten minutes and then put through a food mill.

So far so so.  I milled them and came out the other end with a pretty, pure looking tomato sugo:
I then fried garlic and chilli in butter and olive oil. Too much chilli, in retrospect, but I was hoping for spaghetti that tasted like a medium-strength madras.
I then added cream to try and quench the fiery chilli, making it more korma than madras...
Emergency rescue - resorting to parmesan to save the day...
And a touch of basil to distract the eye / brain...

It was fine.  6 out of 10 fine.  Life's too short for 6 out of 10 pasta.  Next time I'm having curry.

Sunday 7 August 2011

The River Cafe Tagliatelle with asparagus and spring herbs

A simple (ish) summer recipe from this very good little River Cafe cookbook.

The recipe calls for sprue asparagus which the powers of Wikipedia inform me are the skinny first asparagus of the season.  Unfortunately it's now August - asparagus therefore very last season.   However I was cooking for five vegetarians and wanted to make them a posh pasta, I swallowed the food-miles guilt and bought these Peruvian skinnies.
You chop the heads off and boil the stalks and tips independently.  As you will realise from my other blogs, I am quite lazy in the kitchen.
To me boiling the same vegetable in two different stages equates to a labour of love.  One day I may graduate to hand-making ravioli and weaving my own mozzarella (which actually looks quite fun) but for now this is as good as it gets in Casa Newman.
You then boil garlic and cream together, fry some garlic in butter, add a mixture of spring / summer herbs (I used basil, parsley and mint)

and combine together.
At this point one of my loveliest friends arrived with some beautiful lillies for me
and a rainbow appeared
Two events that made me almost as happy as this did:
A note on today's tagliatelle.  I used fresh pasta for this recipe:
Normally I am cut and dried-dried when it comes to pasta.  But I do think fresh pasta does have a more luxurious / high-end feel to it - I think it's texture more than anything. 

The end result was lovely - when I'd dumped a load of parmesan on it.  Very simple and fresh tasting (the mint and basil really pull their weight in this dish).
I was serving it inbetween a very simple tomato and mozzarella salad
and a ridiculously rich triple chocolate brownie and ice-cream
and I think it was a pretty good running order: start off with an almost healthy salad (minus the mozzarella  and olive oil).  Progress to a pasta that is vegetable and herb based (albeit doused in cream and cheese) and then give up any pretense of virtue by the time you reach pudding.

Sunday 17 July 2011

Heston's pea and pancetta spaghetti - with bucatini

Bucatini definitely makes my top 5 pasta shapes.

It's like spaghetti but with a hole right through the middle (buco = hole in Italian, osso buco = bone with a hole.)
 
Bucatini's great for two reasons.

You get all the joy of biting through spaghetti. 

Then you meet the hole in the middle and have a millisecond pause to process your happiness. 

Followed by even more joy when you bite through part two and get to do it all over again.  Magnificent.

The other great thing about bucatini is that if you really put your mind to it, you can whistle through it.  And you can get it from Sainsbury's.  That's three great things.

I'm a huge fan of carbonara, and I had an old Heston / Waitrose recipe card knocking about that I've been meaning to try for-ever ever.  You just can't go wrong with pasta and egg and bacon.  Heston's version also has frozen peas and chillis, and uses no cream, so is dead easy to knock up with store-cupboard stuff (well, I mean it's easy if you don't have cream in your fridge really.) 

Mr. Newman (not my husband, not my brother) was on sous-chef duty.  He did a good job chopping chilli, onion and garlic,

but then insisted on impaling my good knife on the chopping board, like a caveman.
The recipe's super easy and takes no more than ten minutes once your pasta water's boiled.  First fry the above in olive oil for five minutes, till it's soft and sweet,

then add the pancetta and cook gently for another five minutes.  Meanwhile put the pasta in the rolling, boiling water.  Rolling, boiling - this is key.

Mix egg yolks, parmesan and a bit of pasta water together,

add your frozen peas to the bacon and onion mix
Drain the pasta.  I then gave it a little visit from this delicious Sicilian single estate olive oil, new from M&S, which is as good as any really expensive olive oil out there:
Then combine everything back in the pasta pan,
leave to sit for two minutes, then add black pepper and parmesan and serve
Totally perfect mixture of richness, sweetness, saltiness and comfort.  The sort of dish you could happily eat in bed, on the sofa, or serve at a dinner party with a really good bottle of cold white or pink wine.

Me and spaghetti, down by the school yard

I love pasta more than I love most things and most people.

I could eat it every day, and if you take into account the times I've eaten it twice a day, sometimes for breakfast, I probably have eaten it every day for the last twenty years.

On this blog I'm going to post my favourite pasta recipes as and when I make them.  Please send me your favourite recipes and I will cook and eat them too.