Pasta from the back of the new book!

Here is the recipe for the first pasta dish at the back of Leftovers - designed to be eaten when you've just finished a good book and are feeling a temporary sense of loss of entertainment. This pasta is my slightly indulgent take on an Amatriciana – the classic Roman sauce of tomato, bacon and cheese.  It is nowhere near authentic, but it is easy, delicious, comforting and not that bad for you, in a relative universe.  These quantities make enough sauce for two people, but I’ve written as a ‘serves one’, so that if there’s one of you, you can eat the leftover sauce the following day, once you are engrossed in your new book / film, and can’t be bothered to cook.

100g linguine

70g cubed pancetta

a knob of butter

1 tbsp olive oil

1 medium onion – red or white, or 1 large echalion / banana shallot - chopped

1 large clove of garlic, thinly sliced

a pinch of red chilli flakes

a pinch of sugar

a pinch of salt

a tin of tomatoes - peeled cherry tomatoes work well

40ml of single cream

pecorino (this pecorino has been knocking about my fridge since 6th October 2012 and is still perfectly edible.)

Heat the butter and olive oil in a saucepan over a medium heat until the butter has melted.  Add the onion / shallot and cook over a gentle heat for five minutes, stirring occasionally.

Add the pancetta and garlic, and cook for a further ten minutes, stirring, so that the onion starts to turn golden, but doesn’t turn brown.

Add the tomatoes, chilli flakes, salt and sugar, stir, and leave to cook gently on a low heat for 30 minutes.

Meanwhile cook the pasta in boiling salted water.  I chose linguine, because I love the feel of the flatness in my mouth.  

Also, I like the way that the strands of pasta line up in such an orderly and neat fashion before they boil into disarray in the water.

Two minutes before the pasta is ready, add a dollop of single cream to the tomato sauce, stir, taste for seasoning and bring back to a simmer.

Drain the pasta, pour the sauce on top and grate some fresh pecorino (or parmesan) on the top immediately.

  

For what it’s worth, my recommendations as to what to read next are as follows: 

If you’re looking for something very funny, try Bossypants by Tina Fey.

If you’d prefer a smart, sharp thriller, try Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn.

Or if you fancy a movie, see my guide to Ryan Gosling’s greatest hits later in the book.  Or rent / buy The Silver Linings Playbook with the ever-brilliant Jennifer Lawrence, and the not unattractive Bradley Cooper.  It’s funny, a bit spiky, clever and romantic.

Jamie Oliver's spaghetti with prawns, chilli and rocket

I love Jamie, and I love this recipe.  I used to make it all the time.  Then I guess I must have missed cheese, so I veered away from fish based pastas.  But for Mother's Day I made it again, and it really is delicious - spicy, spring-like, fresh, gutsy (from the tomato paste, garlic, chilli and wine) and ultimately  ALL ABOUT THE LEMON ZEST.

Basically you fry chilli and garlic in olive oil, add the prawns and watch as they do their magic trick, turning from grey to pink:

Chuck in some sundried tomato paste, rocket, white wine and lemon juice:

Then toss the sauce through some spaghetti.  Can I just say that no matter how far I roam, spaghetti will almost definitely hold the dearest place in the pasta shaped chamber of my heart.

I think it's all about the perfection of straight lines, the hope of controlling things.

Anyway, combine with the other ingredients, stir through and top with a bit more rocket and some lemon zest.  I cannot stress the degree to which the lemon zest elevates this from good to GRRRREAT.

Totally delicious.

I was then lucky enough to go to lunch at Locanda Locatelli two days later, and being the pasta-whore that I am, ordered pasta with prawns and chilli and garlic, and pistachios:

Really very good.   But I have to say, I think Jamie's and mine had the edge.

Conchiglie with bacon, cream, mushrooms, radicchio and sage.

Conchiglie, one of my all time favourite pasta shapes.

Conchiglie truly would make a good friend.  Look at him!  Those private little sanctums where you can hide all your embarrassing secrets.

Like the fact that if you had your way, every single meal you ate would involve a combo of bacon, cream, fried onions and cheese.

Or the fact that you cannot keep a sage plant alive for more than one moment:

The fact that you only put radicchio in your pasta because you felt guilty about going three whole days without eating any of your five a day.

The fact that you would rather take a mushroom's photo and post it on the internet, than spend those same two minutes tidying up your increasingly chaotic living area.

No.  Not conchiglie.  Conchiglie would wrap up all your secrets safe and warm

and wouldn't unfurl them for anyone, least of all the internet.

And if your pasta was particularly delicious and creamy, with salty bacon and caramelised shallots and parmesan on top, then conchiglie might even share your joy by giving you a smile...

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...)

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. 

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. 

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.