pasta

Pasta con pancetta

~ raychel7 ~ Leave a comment


Ever in the mood for fusilli ? Well this meal is a quick one with bags of flavour. I pan fried the following ingredients together whilst the pasta was boiling away.

  • 1 chopped up garlic clove
  • Handful of mushrooms
  • Half a courgette
  • 3 rashers of chopped pancetta 
  • A few ripe tomatoes

After the pasta had boiled and still had a good bite, I stirred the drained pasta into all of the vegetables and mixed in some Parmesan and chopped up fresh coriander leaves. Drizzle of olive oil and black pepper & finito! Un delizioso pranzo. The trick to good Italian food is having is only using a few ingredients that have bold flavours.

Sausage & carrot mess

~ raychel7 ~ Leave a comment

This is one of my all time favourite pasta dishes that my boyfriend taught me to make in my first year at university. It’s dead simple and takes half an hour.

  • Chop an onion and fry off in a little oil
  • Take a pack of sausages and remove the meat from the skins
  • Add sausage meat to the onions
  • Cook the sausage meat through
  • Grate two large carrots and add to the pan
  • Add a tin of tomatoes, some fresh parsley, a sprinkle of sugar and some Italian herb mix
  • Simmer for 10 minutes 
  • Get some spaghetti on the boil and cook al dente 
  • Dish up together, add fresh parsley and some cheese if you desire

  
I usually make this with tagliatelle but spaghetti works nicely too. I have made this with packaged sausage meat and it was quite fatty so I tend to think it’s worth getting messy peeling the sausages!

Mighty meatballs!

~ raychel7 ~ Leave a comment

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Can’t beat making meatballs on a school night. Nothing to it really, all I did was :

  • Cook off some meatballs in a little oil
  • Rip up some basil leaves and soak in some good olive oil (I bought some really nice pressed stuff at the local market last Saturday)
  • Add a tin of tomatoes to the cooking meatballs and simmer
  • Get a big pan of water on a salty, rolling boil for some tagliatelle
  • Add the infused olive oil to the meatballs and season to taste, add a bit of sugar to bring out the flavour  of the tomatoes
  • Drain pasta when it is al dente and mix into the meatballs
  • EAT!

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Samphire Salmon Pasta

~ raychel7 ~ Leave a comment

salmon

I never buy samphire at the supermarket but I found a big box of the stuff for a very reasonable price the other day and couldn’t resist! It was a chilly Autumn night and I really felt like a comforting fresh pasta dish. I followed an Abel and Cole recipe online (http://www.abelandcole.co.uk/recipes/buttered-salmon–samphire-spaghetti) and hey presto, I got exactly what I felt like. I chucked a load of fresh parsley in at the end and a big knob of butter. Perfect. I’m not sure if I’m turning into James Martin with all these buttery thoughts. I do admire his passion for butter and cream, I like the way that man thinks.