Food swap - pasta with salmon and capers paste from Pantelleria

Manu from the beautiful Cooking Manu blog had the great idea of hosting a food swap for bloggers and non-bloggers alike.

I was partnered with Silvia (co-incidentally Manu's sister in law) who is based in Milan, Italy.  I sent her some local Devon wholegrain honey mustard.  I'm intrigued to see what she comes up with for that!
She sent me something new to me - capers paste.  It's from Pantelleria which she explained is an island in Sicily.  (There's a very interesting post about why capers from that region are so special here.)
Now, I was supposed to have posted a recipe using her ingredient by the 31st March but with typical 'Ruth-time' I'm just a little bit late - oops!
I played with various ideas in my head before deciding to use it in a fairly simple pasta dish.  As I'd never used it before I wanted to get a feel for the strength and depth of flavour first time round.

This made a large meal (with leftovers) for 2.

1 bag fresh pasta
2 salmon fillets (mine happened to be hot smoked ones with peppercorns)
1 onion
2 cloves garlic*
1 tsp+ dried basil
1tsp+ dried oregano
1tbsp+ capers paste (pasta di capperi)
Handful calabrese florets
Handful wild garlic (ramsons) leaves*
Little grated strong cheese, if liked
EVOO
Black pepper
Salt
*Use less garlic if you're not a fan.  I am so it tends to go in everything!

Heat a splosh of EVOO over a low heat in a decent size frying pan.
Finely mince the garlic and add to the pan once the oil is warming up.
Finely chop the onion and add it to the pan.  Sweat down for several minutes.
Get a large pan of water boiling for the pasta.  Once it comes to the boil add a generous pinch of salt and the pasta.  Fresh pasta generally only takes 3-4 minutes so keep an eye on the time.
Add the herbs to the onion pan and stir well.  If you feel the mix is drying out now or at any point you may want to add a little water - nab some from the pasta pan if so.
Add the capers paste a little at a time, stirring in well each time and giving it a minute to cook in then tasting.  Bear in mind that the plain pasta will soak up a lot of flavour.
Drain off the pasta once it's done, reserving a little of the cooking water.
Cook the salmon fillets in the pan with the onions and garlic, flake them up as they cook through.
Throw in a handful of calabrese cut into small florets and 4 or 5 minced ramson leaves.  Add a little of the pasta water now to steam the veg.
Grind in black pepper to taste and stir into the pasta.  Add a little grated cheese if liked, I felt the dish needed that extra flavour to balance the salty umami notes from the capers and the strength of the garlic.
Serve and enjoy.

 This was delish and gave me a good idea of how the capers paste works in a dish.  It certainly has a big flavour but also seems invaluable for the umami notes.  I can see this having an incredible affinity with good tomatoes and black olive tapenade on some fantastic bread...Mmmmm...

Arrabiata prawn pasta - speedy supper

Speedy supper for when  it's late, you're tired and hungry and no - you really can't be bothered being virtuous and make a sauce from scratch.  Nowt wrong with that in my opinion.  'Arrabiata' means Angry - which is a reference to the chilli kick this sauce has.  You could use whatever sauce you have in the cupboard though and add your own chilli - or leave it out as you like.  It's quick and simple but still tasty - ideal.

Speedy prawn pasta
Stock cube - veg
EVOO
Pasta
1 onion
2-3 cloves garlic
Butter
Mushrooms
Salt
Jar arrabiata pasta sauce - ours was Aldi for about 75-80p-ish but not bad
2-3 tbsp tomato puree
Mushroom ketchup
Dried basil
Handful prawns
Handful spinach
Grated cheese - parmesan if you have it in, cheddar if you don't [or are forgetful of your recent parmesan purchasing activities like I was - dur!!]
Black Pepper

Cook the pasta in plenty of water seasoned with the stock cube and a splosh of oil to prevent sticking.  (I always put the kettle on for the water for things like pasta as it takes a lot less time than boiling the water on the hob from cold - especially if you have an electronic hob - I'm soooo glad I have gas!!)  Ensure to cook al dente as it'll be added to the sauce and heated again later.
Meanwhile heat a little butter and oil in a large wide saucepan.
Chop the onion and garlic and add to pan.  Cook gently to soften.
Chop the mushrooms - use however many you like / have in stock.  I used 5/6 I think.
Add to the pan with the onion and garlic, sprinkle a little salt and cook covered to keep the juices in, stirring occasionally until the mushrooms have sweated right down.
Add the pasta sauce.  As I mentioned ours was an Aldi effort - not bad but it did taste a little sweet to me so I added a good squirt of tomato puree - probably 2-3 tbsp and a splash of mushroom ketchup to counteract this and give the sauce some depth.
Add a decent pinch of basil - I was out of oregano otherwise I'd have added this too.  Any Italian herbs you have will do.
Stir thoroughly then add the pasta and stir well again to get it all covered in sauce.  We had S'bury's basics penne - the grooves hold the sauce nicely and it's v. frugal at a mere 17p for 500g dried product - that's even better than Aldi or Lidl can manage!
Ensure it's heated through thoroughly then add your prawns.  I buy the S'bury's basics frozen 300g bags at £2 a go.  As long as you don't overcook them they're fine, just smaller.  (Hence if overcooked they'll a) vanish and b) turn hard - yeurgh!)  It means that for that price I don't mind adding a large handful - I love prawns!!  [I also know myself and after defrosting while they're sat on the side waiting to go into the pan we seem to magically lose half of them - very odd it is...]
Cook only enough to just heat them *through then add the spinach and turn it into the pasta and sauce, cover the pan and remove from the heat.  Let stand for a bare minute to wilt the spinach.
Serve and sprinkle with grated cheese and a good few twists of black pepper on top.  Voilà!!  Shouldn't have taken too long so now feel free to go collapse and chillax.
*Obviously using your common sense where seafood and the heating / cooking thereof is concerned.  I accept nowt &c &c...
If you don't have spinach use whatever you have; adding at the right point so it gets cooked.  EG - if it's calabrese I'd add for the last 2 mins of the pasta cooking time and thereafter drain it etc all together.  Treat this as a vague guideline suggestion type iof thing and ensure you have value pasta and a jar of sauce in the cupboard for those times and you're away.

Celeb chef Italian

So on Thursday we chose Italian for dinner at Jamie's Italian on Black Lion Street in Brighton. This is a Jamie Oliver place but contrary to my expectations it wasn't too exorbitantly priced (for the area) and was in fact very good food. Service was good apart for a long wait to start with before our drinks order was taken.
Being completely incapable of choosing [I can be very indecisive when it comes to picking off menus if there's a modicum of things I can actually go for. And I mean very indecisive!] I actually went for 2 starter portions of different pasta dishes. I was very happy to see squid ink pasta on the menu; squid ink is one of those things I've been keeping an eye out for, in order to try it. This was Scallop with Squid Ink Angel Hair and the pasta was divine. Somehow I expected the squid ink to have a fairly intense flavour - down to the strong colour I suppose. It was in fact far more subtle than I expected and really rather good. Eating with 5 others; all meat eaters [variously tucking into pheasant, pork belly and lamb] it was pronounced the best dish at the table. Angel hair is like an even thinner spaghetti so when it's coloured black as this one was it can look quite odd but trust me - this is well worth going for if you should stumble across it on a menu. The scallops were gorgeous as scallops always are; they were sliced and scattered over the top so you didn't get masses of them but this was the starter portion.
I should mention that we were all trying each other's dishes - although not the meat for me. The Braised Fennel side was also very good but the chips; I have to say, weren't a patch on HFW's on my recent visit to the River Cottage Refectory.
The second pasta dish was the Mushroom Panzerotti. A lovely dish in it's own right although it couldn't compete with the squid number. This panzerotti was basically a large crescent shaped ravioli thing - think pasta parcel. It was served with gremolata which I have to admit to not knowing what it was but our resident Italian speaker at the table cleared that up for me. This version had tomato notes as well as being topped with fried sage - deffo a chef-y touch that IMO did nothing for the actual dish.
All in all if you like Italian I don't think you'd be disappointed there but that comes with the caveat that I have never actually been to Italy to sample the cuisine in it's home environs, as it were. I had a lovely and filling meal although you may have noticed there are no photos of it.
That however will have to be a story for tomorrow...

The joy of teeny tiny pasta :-D

'Soup pasta' as it's known, seems to be ridiculously hard to come by here. There's the odd online company selling it but the ones I saw charged a lot for postage so when I knew some friends were visiting Spain recently on holiday I pleaded with them - "bring me Stellini" I cried, a-wailing and a-gnashing of my teeth. Ok so maybe I'm over dramatising a little (!) here but it is irritating that something considered so basic an item on the continent should be so scarce on the ground and exhorbitantly over-priced once you add in the postage here. [This company sells it at 99p a box - a normal price for the product but the postage is £6.50 on top!! Eek!]

I have an abiding soft spot for this pasta (tiny star shapes) having been fed it as a small child by my mother (nope - she doesn't know where to get it now either) and you can eat it as pasta on it's own as well as using it in a soup or broth.

On it's own you get something similar to risotto in feel but taking a lot less time to cook. Seemingly I've muppeted up and mislaid the notes I made when making this but it was very comforting, and the pasta was only 1.20 Euro a 500g bag - result! I added onion, garlic, spinach, sweetcorn and cheese. I'm afraid the pic is so bad as to be un-postable but basically - just because something is designated 'soup pasta' [or whatever] it doesn't have to only be used for that purpose. I think that's the point I'm trying to get across here...

Yay! And some severe miscalculations...

A little yay, just to myself. :-D Tee hee

The miscalculation - well if you were paying attention you may have noticed that apparently over 3 recipes I got 750-800g of spaghetti from a 500g pack. Hmmm - methinks not. Now I've had a niggling feeling about my scales for a while now but that's quite a lot out. :-(
However, should you wish to approach one of the 'ghetti dishes with the notion of giving it a go they're all adaptable to how many you want to serve, what you've got in the house etc. You may only have half a broccoli head in the fridge, or no nuts - it doesn't matter just go for it. It's all about the 'ish' of cooking! If I was forced to hazard a guess I'd say perhaps recipe#1 was 200-250g, #2 was 100g and #3 150-200g. Approximately. Ish.
[Now tell me I'm not the only one that thinks that'd be a great title for a cook book: "The Ish of Cooking." You saw it here first!]

Spaghetti recipe #3 - Lemon Broccoli

For the last recipe to use up my batch of CFC bargainous 'ghetti I adapted and added to a recipe from the Good Housekeeping book 'Eat Well, Stay Well' making use of the ingredients I had in the house. [Although this book has a good review on Amazon I personally don't rate it that much, it's ok but I hardly ever go to it for anything.)

Spaghetti & Broccoli in a lemon nut butter sauce
1oz hazlenuts -toasted
1.5-2oz butter
3 cloves garlic
1 lemon
0.5 tbsp dried basil
10oz / 300g ish fresh spaghetti
Broccoli - approx 1 small-med head
2tbsp sgl cream (I used the last of the dbl cream I had in the fridge and a little milk to make about 2 tbsp)
S & P

Chop the hazlenuts and toast gently under the grill, I found it easiest to do this in a small foil pie dish or you could make a dish shape from foil. Keep an eye on them and remove once done.
Zest and juice the lemon, keeping the 2 seperate. I added some of the pulpy flesh to the juice as well.
Melt butter until golden brown in a big enough pan to take the broccoli and pasta as well. Meanwhile peel and thinly slice the garlic.
Once butter's golden brown (keep an eye on it to ensure it doesn't burn) add garlic and nuts and cook, stirring, for 30ish secs. Add lemon zest and dried basil, stir and remove from the heat.

Chop broccoli into bite size florets, cook and drain. Cook and drain the spaghetti. Stir both into the butter mix over a low heat for 2-3 mins.

Add lemon juice and cream and stir in. Taste and season as required with salt and freshly ground black pepper.


This was pretty good; if making again I'd probably use slightly less lemon and perhaps a little more cream. The lemon did dominate more than I expected. However lemon will 'cook out' so a little more heating can help neutralise this.

Adding this amount of broccoli made this into a 3 serving meal, one to eat and 2 for the freezer.

I make it that I got 9 servings from a 500g bag of fresh pasta once I'd added the seafood / spinach / broccoli. Not bad for the 79p it cost plus the 50ish p for the double cream. Everything else came from the store cupboard / freezer. Even more satisfyingly I now have 5 portions of ready made scrummy pasta goodness secreted in the freezer for the month ahead.

Spaghetti recipe #2 - Spinach

This was the second 'ghetti dish I made from the CFC pasta find from Thursday, using store cupboard bits with spinach from the freezer and a little of the leftover dbl cream. A very quick recipe indeed if using fresh pasta.

Spaghetti in a spinach, cream and nutmeg sauce

0.5 pt veg stock

2 lumps frozen spinach [I'm guessing they're pretty much the same size from diff shops but mine is Iceland: 1 kg=£1]

Ground nutmeg - 1 teaspoon in total

2 fl oz / 60ml ish dbl Cream

200g fresh pasta / barely cooked pasta (al dente) [I think = approx 100g uncooked dry pasta]

S & P

Lemon juice

Place stock and spinach in pan and bring to simmer.

Add half tsp nutmeg and several decent grinds black pepper. Stir in the dbl cream.

Add pasta and bring back to boil to reduce further.

Taste and adjust seasonings. I found that a lot of the nutmeg taste seemed to have 'cooked out' at this point so I added another half teaspoon and a splash of lemon juice. Lemon will also disappear the more you cook it so plate up straight away.

Serve with plenty of black pepper ground over and if got; a sprinkle of grated parmesan.

Nutmeg goes well with spinach and I think the lemon in the recipe helps it from becoming too 'spinachy' if you know what I mean. Stops it from just tasting 'dark green'.

I thoroughly enjoyed this and it was enough for 2 portions - 1 for me now [er - then in fact. Fri 7.5.10] and one to freeze for later.

Spaghetti Recipe #1 - Seafood

Whilst perusing the local CFC* for inspiration for dinner I spied a pack of 500g fresh pasta reduced to 79p and decided to see what I could make out of it. Having previously alluded on here to the fact that I never cook spaghetti this actually was, yep - spaghetti but I figured for 79p I could just scissor it into sensible bits and get over my whole strange spaghetti aversion already. [I love pasta but for some reason spaghetti has just never quite pushed the right buttons for me in a pasta stylee way. I have no idea why so please don't ask.)

Anyway, I thought I'd try and use up some store cupboard / freezer bits in the dish and hence add a bit of frugality kudos points to the 'ghetti. This has in necessity made it fairly idiosyncratic but use the basic sauce base and add what you like / have lying about. After all, who doesn't have a jar of marinated octopus chunks gathering dust in the back of the cupboard??! :-D

Spaghetti con frutti di mare, i pomodori e la crema

Ok ok it doesn't need to be called that but hey - it sounds good ok?

Olive Oil

1 Onion

2 Cloves Garlic

Dried Basil - 2 generous pinches

Dried Oregano - 2 generous pinches

Carton / Tin chopped toms in juice (400g)

Approx 250-300g fresh pasta

5 fl oz / 120 ml dbl Cream

Handful cooked prawns, defrosted

Half a jar marinated Octopus chunks

S & P

Last few sad leaves of your 'live' basil plant

Heat a little olive oil in a decent size pan. Finely chop the onion and garlic and soften over a low heat in the olive oil. Add the dried herbs and a generous grinding of black pepper.

Add the toms - I had a S'burys basics carton - only 33/4p ish, and bring to a simmer to reduce.

Cook pasta according to instructions. I cooked the whole 500g bag but only used about 1/2 to 2/3 of the pasta in this sauce. Once cooked drain well.

Add the cream to the sauce, use as much or as little as you like depending how creamy / healthy you want it.

Drain half the jar of octopus and if liked chop the chunks into bitesize pieces. Add to the sauce and let simmer again until consistency you prefer.

Add the prawns (s'burys basics again) and last few leaves of the sad looking basil plant on the kitchen windowsill and ensure prawns heated through. Season to taste with S & P.

Add the pasta and stir well to ensure evenly coated and heated through.

Serve.

I was pleased with this, it had the taste / look of a far more expensive dish to prepare and was really tasty. I have to admit I had seconds (hungry work that voting lark) and this still gave me enough for 2 portions to freeze.

I think it would be very nice with a grating of parmesan over; I didn't have any in the house but it would work.

*CFC: Condemned Food Counter; where you find the reduced stuff that's going out of date soon. Courtesy of the Cottage Smallholder Blog.