General Blog About Everything

Leafy Italian broccoli, or broccoletti, lends itself to pasta dishes as the
delicate stalks and leaves just wilt into the dish. I’ve also used some baby
plum tomatoes in this dish that I semi-dried and preserved in olive oil and
herbs last summer, but you could just as easily use sun-blushed tomatoes
(available from supermarket deli counters or Merchant Gourmet) simply cut
up. I’ve also based the sauce on an infused oil which I made from the prawn
shells. If you buy head- and shell-on prawns for this dish you can make
about half a litre or so of well-flavoured oil that you can keep in the
fridge for drizzling on fish or in pasta dishes like this.

I’ve used a pasta here that is a bit like a chopped-up pappardelle. It’s easy
to eat and soaks up the rich sauce well. Chicken livers make a great base
for a pasta sauce – they can be chopped as finely or as coarsely as you wish
and here I’ve added wild garlic to give the pasta that seasonal touch. Wild
garlic works perfectly in all sorts of pasta dishes as it naturally wilts
into the sauce and you could even just use wild garlic, olive oil and butter
to make a really simple and tasty pasta sauce.

Sardinian couscous, or fregola, is an ancient type of semolina pasta that is
particularly good in a salad or served hot with seafood. This unusual dish
was typically served in fishing villages. Cuttlefish ink is pretty easy to
come by these days, but order it in advance from your fishmonger to be on
the safe side. If you can’t find cuttlefish, squid will do a similar job.

This is not your average British trattoria dish, but you’ll almost certainly
find it on a menu in Italian family restaurants in the US; the kind of place
you’d expect to bump into the Sopranos. You can also turn it into something
quite sophisticated by using, say, wild boar, lamb or even veal. Or you can
use other types of pasta, such as spaghettini, for this dish.

This is a very basic pasta sauce; you can use fresh chillis, but the flavour
will be more consistent if you use the dried variety. The word arrabbiata
means "angry", hence the little kick of chilli.

This is a great way to use up pasta leftovers, although I did try it on my
daughters Ellie and Lydia once and they asked my why I was serving last
night’s dinner in an omelette, so make sure you don’t serve both to the same
people! You can tart it up a bit by adding, say, shredded wild garlic or
herbs.

Bolognese sauce is one of the great comfort staples of Italian cooking. It’s
also got the advantage of being a master of disguise. You can use dried
cannelloni shells for this – or I sometimes use fresh lasagne sheets and
roll them up around the chilled sauce and just slightly overlap them.