PASTA
Sausage Meat & Chicken Liver Ragu
Cauliflower & Broccoli Mac ’N’ Cheese
Rich Tomato Italian Meatballs with Linguine
Creamy Pork Kidney Tagliatelle
Spicy Tomato & Chorizo Baked Gnocchi
Up until the age of seven, I refused point-blank to even try pasta – in my mind it was a hot pile of rubbery blandness that had no real importance to any of the types of food I liked. That all changed on a trip to Italy, when in a restaurant I was served a huge bowl of rich and sweet tomatoey spaghetti, which I watched a typically Italian waiter dust from a height with Parmesan cheese. I reluctantly tucked in but after one sucked, slurped and savoured mouthful I knew that this staple Italian ingredient was for me.
When we came home, I insisted my aunt Erica show me how to make the fresh stuff and so we spent an afternoon together, with a rickety old pasta-rolling machine clamped to the kitchen table, covered in flour as we made up thin yellow sheets of pasta. While they dried off, draped over the handle of a broom propped across two chairs, we set about making a spicy tomato sauce. The fresh pasta was then plunged into boiling water and a few minutes later drained straight from the water with tongs, before being plonked and mingled into the big pan of sauce and served in generous portions. Heaven in a bowl!
Fresh pasta is incredibly inexpensive to make, but as a nation, for convenience purposes, we have adopted the dried variety as one of our staple storecupboard ingredients. Although quite different from its fresh cousin, dried pasta is just as delicious and makes a filling and cheap base for lots of fantastic dishes. It’s generally just a bit of an all-rounder and I love the fact that after it’s spent less than 15 minutes in the pot, I have the bones of a great dinner underway with very little fuss. These pasta dishes are all total bargains, in that they will feed a crowd using simple ingredients, healthy vegetables and inexpensive cuts of meat.