Wild Mushroom and Sausage Fettuccine

This is a favourite simple supper of mine.  You could leave out the sausages and/or throw in some crème fraiche and parsley if you like – it’s really a fairly flexible feast.  But I generally have a real thing for pasta, especially in the colder, wetter months.  When working late and I cannot be bothered to do a big cook, this is perfect.

This feeds two, but could easily be halved.

Ingredients:

200g mushrooms (see below)
2 sausages
2 cloves of garlic
50g butter
150-200g fettuccini (depending on how hungry you are)

I’ve used some speciality mushrooms here, just because Sainsbury’s had them in when I was shopping.  You can use anything really, but I recommend portabello if there’s nothing particularly exotic about.

It’s probably a good idea to get your pasta water on from the word go.  The dish doesn’t take long to make, and you want everything to be ready at once.

Start by prepping the mushrooms – you want them sliced / separated into ribbons.  How you do this will really turn on what mushrooms you’ve bought.

Next up, get a big frying pan on the heat and glug in a bit of olive oil.  Squeeze the sausage meet out of the sausages, discarding the skins, and fry the sausage meet in little chunks, breaking it up as it cooks.

You want to end up with slightly browned, crispy and fully cooked little chunks.

When done, remove from the pan using a slotted spoon and set aside, leaving as much of the rendered fat behind as possible.

You probably want to get the pasta in the pot now, so that’s ready when your mushrooms are.

Add half the butter to the pan and get your mushrooms cooking, so that they soften and begin to brown.  You may need to add a bit more oil, as mushrooms can really soak the fat up, but don’t overdo it.

When the mushrooms are soft, peel and crack the garlic cloves and add to the pan.  Don’t do this sooner or else the garlic will burn (as it cooks quicker than the mushrooms) and leave a nasty, bitter taste.  Add the rest of the butter with the garlic and reintroduce the sausages.

Cook for 5 minutes, but don’t let the mushrooms get too crispy.  Drain the pasta and throw it into the pan with the mushrooms and sausage mix.  Using tongs, mix the two together so that they are fully combined, then serve up, covered in grated parmesan.

Pesto

This really isn’t a recipe; I feel like a bit of a fraud.  It's shockingly easy, almost nothing more than a case of assembly.  But I will say one thing: it is absolutely, totally worth it.  I have completely fallen back in love with pasta and pesto now I've made this.  it's a million times better than that green gunk that comes in jars and at least a thousand times better than the 'fresh' stuff the supermarkets produce.  It's also all about adjusting the taste to fit what you want it to taste like.

 

You will need:

 

2 packets of fresh basil (about 50g)
100g pine nuts
100g parmesan
1 clove of garlic
A wedge of lemon
Olive oil (some)

On the subject of olive oil, there is amazingly broad range going around at the moment.  I am currently using a bottle that a colleague gave me.  She's married to a Cypriot whose family has their own olive grove, so this is kind of home grown.  Whatever you go for, bear in mind that the oil here will make a big difference – it's essentially the base of the sauce.  Don’t use something too cheap, because it will infect the whole dish.  If you use something too expensive (which tends to include spicier, stronger, more peppery oils) it will blot out too much of the basil flavour. 

First, get the oven on and lightly toast the pine nuts.  Did you know you can now buy pre-toasted pine nuts? C'est ridicule.  Paying an extra quid for something that takes 10 minutes to do yourself is just burning money. 

Whilst that's happening, pick the leaves from the stalks of the basil and discard the stalks.  As I've mentioned before, basil stalks are rather fibrous and will wrap themselves around the blade of a blender and clog it up.  Also, they won't blend properly, so you're better off without. 

Also, grate the parmesan now.

 

You know I said this was easy?  Well, you're about 75% done already.  Throw the basil, cheese and pine nuts into the food processor along with a squeeze of lemon and whizz for about two seconds, no more.  Add an enormous glug of olive oil and repeat.  Keep adding olive oil to the mulch until you have a soft jam-like consistency.

Now, take the lid off and taste it.  You'll probably need to season it as well, but try fiddling around, adding more cheese or another squeeze of lemon, or more oil. 

And then you're done.  Ta da!  See, easy peasy lemon (and basil) squeezy, huh?

This is a fantastic sauce for anything.  For some reason, it always screams 'summer' to me.  Perhaps it's the fresh, no nonsense flavours or scents of basil.  Pasta pesto is the classic, but it also goes well drizzled over pizza, or chicken breasts to be baked in the oven.  If you're making the classic pancetta wrapped cod, smear a blob of pesto all over the ham before wrapping, for a ultra-classy version of an already pretentious dish.  Alternatively, liven up an old school one, as I have below, by drizzling a tomato salad (or, indeed, any salad) with pesto and a sprinkling of balsamic vinegar.

 - GrubsterBoy -

Al-Desko Dining: Coco di Mama

I love pasta.  Like actually love it.  And nowhere does it better for lunch than Coco di Mama. 

 

Let's start with the bag.  What?! (I hear you cry.)  No, seriously, there's a point to be made here.  Even the bag – even the paper carrier that you cart your lunch back to your desk in –looks great, like it just fell out of some high-end fashionista boutique in Milan.  Like someone's spent time styling it, making sure that it captures some glorious Roman Holiday feel.  If ever a bag could be anthropomorphised, it would be this one.  And it would be strutting its way down the Via della Conciliazione, wearing obscenely big designer sunglasses and the latest Italian printed silks. 

Open it up, and it doesn’t get any worse at all.  The theme continues, reiterating the point that this is something special.  This isn't microwaved lasagne or a pot noodle (I actually saw someone eating one of those at their desk the other day – classy); this is proper pasta. 

Why is this important?  Well, I'll tell you why.  It shows that someone, somewhere, cares.  Actually cares.  Cares not just about making a quick buck but about making your meal an experience.  And, hell, if I'm gonna be forced to eat lunch at my desk most days, I want the odd experience from time to time to get me through those days.

 

The sauce options are many and legion, from staples (like Bolognese) to extraordinaries (like Bloody Mary, with actual vodka), as well as 'naked pasta' – pasta tossed with olive oil and chunky ingredients.  I went for garden pesto, a medley of parmesan, pine nuts and basil.  It's frickin' amazeballs.  Seriously, this stuff is good – you wouldn’t think it, given that it’s basically just mashed herb, but it is good.  Seriously good.  Seriously this-is-what-every-bloody-Italian-restaurant-should-be-serving good.  It makes you swear off that dry, overpowering, mouldgreen gunge that comes in jars in the supermarket. 

A friend of mine said, of Coco di Mama's pesto pasta: "It makes me slightly cross, because they're charging you seven quid for what must cost them about seventy pence to throw together.  But then I don’t mind – and keep going back every day to get it – because it just tastes so bloody good."

 

It's also worth noting that the pasta is bronze press pasta, a method of making pasta that's slightly more antiquated, more old-fashioned and thus expensive, but which leaves the pasta with a slightly rougher texture.  I could go on about this method's pros and cons, its history, the technical process it involves, but... All you need to know is this: It makes more sauce stick.  Which is, invariably, a good thing.

Today's pasta style was... Well, I can’t remember the name, so let's call it 'squiggles'.  Great for holding sauce, and it's also got terrific bite.

 

All in all, an expensive but fantastically satisfying desk lunch.

 

 - GrubsterBoy -

Courgette Carbonara

Courgettes were in season relatively recently, and GrubsterGirl's mummy grows them by the bucketload.  It's absolutely fantastic eating food that you've seen grown from seed in someone's garden – it's natural, fresh, exciting.  Really.

It's also free, and we tend to get rather a lot of it.  Not that there's anything wrong with that – I like lots of free food. 

This is a good way of eating them – and it's really bloody easy, so a good one to throw together after a long, dull day at work.

Ingredients:

x2 courgettes, decently sized  (turns out we didn’t get quite as many this year as we were anticipating...)
x4 rashers of back bacon
50 ml single cream
25g fresh parmesan (or a small handful, once grated, is probably an easier way to work this one out)
2 large eggs
Bunch of thyme
Black peppercorns 
Pasta (rigatoni for me, but penne would work just as well)

1. Top and tail and slice your courgettes (or zucchini if you're going to get all American on me) lengthways, then slice further into diagonal half-moons.  Keep'em nice and chunky – they should soften up when cooked.  Slice the bacon into chunky stips.  This is a chunky dish, so fear not. 

2. Separate the egg yolks from the whites.  Stick the whites in a bowl in the fridge to make meringues another day – you won’t be needing them here.  Add the parmesan cheese so that it looks a bit like a beard, to keep yourself entertained.

Labour the point unnecessarily.

Add the cream as well, and mix it all up into a nice creamy sauce. 

4. Get out your biggest frying pan, lug in some olive oil and fry the bacon until it's cooked and just starting to turn a little brown.  Turn the heat up all the way to the top and add the white wine - cooking it until it's reduced to a sticky residue.  Then throw your courgettes in there. 

Add the thyme.  Smash up the black pepper in a pestle and mortar and chuck that in too.  You want to add quite a bit of pepper – enough to give it a fiery kick.  I actually used long pepper, which is an ancient and extremely aromatic pepper, which you should track down if you can.  It has a sweet, musky perfume to the flavour that really adds something to the dish.

Long pepper comes in gucci little catkins, and I used a couple for this dish.  It was the first time I'd tried them out, so was a touch nervous, but you could go for a third if you wanted something with real punch.  Just be wary of drowing out the other flavours.

5. Get the pasta on now.  When it's done, the courgettes should be pretty soft.  If they look like they're getting soft too soon, you can always turn the heat right down – or even off – and reheat at the crucial moment. 

6. When the pasta's cooked, drain it and add it to the frying pan, reserving a mug-full of the cooking water if you can.  Work quickly now, and turn off the heat under the courgettes.  Toss the pasta into the courgettes so nicely combined and the pasta is covered in the cooking fats.  Then add the creamy sauce and a splash of the cooking water, and stir stir stir.  Don’t whatever you do, turn the heat back on – if you do you'll end up with scrambled egg pasta, which is not especially nice.  Add more of the cooking water if you think it needs it – it'll give it a smooth, shiny texture.

Serve immediately with grated parmesan (if you like).  Don’t muck about – this is not a dish that is improved by being tepid. 

 - GrubsterBoy -

Sausage Pasta Sauce

I have been terribly absent of late.  Very naughty.  Very sorry.

One of my (not particularly good) excuses for being absent is that I've recently whisked down to Brighton to watch one of the party conferences in action.  Not especially food relevant, except to say that there's a wonderfully exciting vegetarian restaurant (I know, vegetarian = wrong) called Terre à Terre which has simply got to be tried, and a great little gelateria called Boho Gelato which has some very entertaining flavours.

But enough of all that.  This post is really about pasta.  You'll see why in a sec.
Apart from the papery vol-au-vents and greasy samosas that are handed round at receptions in lieu of canapés, there's not really much to recommend political conferences in terms of their food.  But that doesn’t stop people talking about food.  And in the middle of the conference I remembered a series of Tweets I'd seen over the summer from Ed Balls MP about BBQing.

Now, whether you like Ed Balls or not is irrelevant, and I make no comment in that regard.  It caught my eye for one reason and one reason only: How about a post on politicians' recipes?
I scoured the internet, and before long something turned up.  It was a face off of Gordon Brown and David Cameron donating recipes to a charity cookbook.

Gordon's was unremarkable.  What a surprise.

David's was very remarkable.  Mostly because I've seen it before.  Mostly because it mirrors, basically, word-for-word the quick sausage pasta sauce recipe set out in Ruth Rogers' and Rose Grey's inimitable River Café cookbook.  Thieving sod. 

I know this because it's one of my all-time favourite dishes and I've cooked this recipe so many times that I've got it basically by heart. 

So I'm going to share it with you too.  Sort of.  Because, having tried and re-tried this recipe from memory so many times, I imagine I'm a little off with the details.  But this should work nevertheless.

Ingredients:

x6 decent bangers. (River Café book says specialist Italian sausages, but I prefer to use Sainsbury's red wine and venison sausages, which are brilliant.  Actually, Sainos does some Italian style ones that I've used and are pretty good.)

x1 clove of garlic
x1 yellow onion
Chili flakes (a good pinch of)
1/3 bottle of vin rouge.  Or vino rosso, I guess.
X1 400g tins of chopped toms
Parmesan (couple of handfuls)
1/3 to 1/2 nutmeg
Crème fraiche

Pasta (I use Rigatoni.  Because it's aces and I love it.)

1. Chop your garlic into tiny wee pieces.  Chop your onion small too.  Cook off the onion for a bit, then add your garlic, so it doesn’t burn.  Cook until soft and translucent, but not going brown.  No crispy bits wanted here.

As you can see, I'm using my favourite, massive Le Creusset.  In most cases, you could get away with using a big frying pan or a skillet, but as I'm doubling the recipe I had to go for something bigger.  Just imagine that it’s a big skillet if you're using the pictures for guidance.  Or just double the quantities, because this is bloody marvellous stuff.

2. Skin your sausages.  They start out lovely…

…and end up looking a bit like meaty poos. 

See what I mean?

3. Get the pot nice and hot and add said sausages to the pot Cook the sausage meat right down, until any associated liquid has disappeared, breaking it up into smaller chunks as you go along.  At first, it won’t want to break up, but it gets easier the more it's cooked. 

4.  When the liquid has gone, add the chili flakes.  Another alternative could be using a whole chipotle (a type of Mexican smoked chili), but I didn't think about that 'til it was too late.  Now keep cooking the meat until it’s browned and starting to crisp.  This can take up to 15-20 minutes.

5.  By now you're probably trying to find out where I live.  Because I've given you a recipe and you've followed it religiously, and now you have an amazing amount of crap stuck to the bottom of your beautiful (and rather expensive) enamel pot that you're quite convinced will never come off.  Well, fret not.  Not it's time to add the wine and give it a scrape. 

See?  All better now.  Now turn the gas up to full and cook the wine off completely. 

6.  Once the wine's gone, add the tomatoes, bring to a simmer and reduce the heat to keep it there. 

Go and watch the telly for a bit, stirring intermittently, because you want this all to cook right down to a sludge, without it sticking any more (I'm not going to let you add more wine if it does, sorry) and so that the tomatoes have completely broken down into slop.  This takes at least half an hour

7. Get the pasta on.  Cook to instructions.

8. Add the parmesan and nutmeg and stir stir stir until it's all melted in.  This is why there's no real need to season until now; the nutmeg takes the pepper's place and the parmesan is salty enough.  So now taste and test.  Oh, and take the sauce off the heat.

9. When the pasta is ready, drain and return to its pan.  Add a couple of dollops of sauce and a couple of tablespoons of crème fraiche per person.  Mix it all up.

Just a note: If you add all the crème fraiche to the sauce at this stage, you can’t really reheat it, as the fat in the cream will separate.  If you're going to eat the whole thing in sitting, then go ahead and mix the sauce and the cream together – you'll actually find it easier to mix them without the pasta.  But if not, I'd do it this way around.

And there you have it.  Throw more parmesan on if you like, but I don’t reckon you'll need it.

Al-Desko Dining: My Pasta Bar

Al-Desko Dining: Because having to work through lunch shouldn’t mean you have to eat the same old tired damp sandwich day after day until the end of recorded time.

 

I love pasta.  Always have done.  It's my go-to dish, my emergency have-to-eat-quickly dish, my oh-no-there's-nothing-in-the-house-to-eat dish, and my all-time favourite, ultimate comfort food.  There's something so incredibly satisfying and hearty about it, especially when covered in a mountain of rich, meaty sauce and salty parmesan.  Yum yum yum. 

 

So when I learned that Gino D'Acampo (famous, perhaps, for his stints of This Morning and I'm a Celebrity…) was opening up a new fast-food pasta bar within spitting distance of my office, I got very excited.

 

Earlier this week I headed out to My Pasta Bar to see what the fuss was about.

 

The concept is actually refreshingly simple: there's a range of pre-packaged foods, all fresh Italian staples, like pizza focaccia or arancini (deep-fried risotto balls of heart-clogging goodness), as well as a range of pasta-and-sauce options – five for carnivores, five for veggies.  But you're not tied into anything; you are totally free to mix-and-match your choices – carefully selecting your favourite style of pasta and combining it with the most mouth-watering sauce you can find.

 

My meal of choice: Penne Bolognese.

 

 

Let's start with the important thing here: it tastes great.  Rich, meaty, tomatoey goodness.  I don’t know about the authenticity of this – then again, there's real controversy over the 'authentic' Bolognese recipe – but it's a tasty nevertheless, and that's what counts. 

 

If I was going to make one complaint it would be this: I like my pasta al dente, with a good amount of bite, and this was lacking.  But I would modify that with two things: (a) it's hard, if not impossible, to do pasta as fast-food and keep it crunchy.  Would I rather miss out of fast-food pasta than have it more cooked than to my liking?  No.  And (b) GrubsterGirl tells me that I basically eat my pasta raw (I disagree, but hey).  So perhaps, at least on this one tiny detail, I am biased.

 

Back at My Pasta Bar, it gets better: it's totally customisable.  By which I mean that, in addition choosing your pasta and sauce, you're also presented with a tray of little dinky pots of Stuff.  These include parmesan, basil oil and chilli oil.  All good, all tasty, and a lovely little touch. 

 

 

One last thing: it was enormous.  There's no way you don’t get value for money, at least in terms of quantity.  I wanted to hide under my desk and have a little nap.

 

Price?  Decent, I reckon.  All in, including a blood orange San Pellegrino (the yummy, ever-so-authentically Italiano, often shockingly expensive soft drink), the total damage was £6.75.  So not an everyday experience, but very good value for what you get.

 - GrubsterBoy -