Pasta Nigellissima

70s style dining experience

Unlike Nigella I do not have packets of pasta that I just look at because they are pretty.  I don't have space in my kitchen or my life for this kind of frivolity. I don't really think I have space in my life for Nigella, but she is a little bit lovely.

This is nothing like Nigella's pasta recipe - the only ingredients I think it has in common are smoked mackerel, capers and pasta. 

However, when I saw her make her version it did make me think about making a pasta and mackerel dish. Although I intended to make something using orzo, I didn't have enough for 2 people and so made a slightly different dish using fusili and whatever was in my fridge that I thought would go.

Pasta Nigellissima ingredients

• As much pasta as you want for 2 people
• 2 small smoked mackerel fillets (100-150g), flaked
• 2 spring onions, finely chopped
• 1 tablespoon capers, finely chopped
• 2 handfuls rocket
• A handful cherry tomatoes, halved
•  1/2 bunch parsley, finely chopped
•  3 tablespoons breadcrumbs

How to make pasta with smoked mackerel

1. Cook the pasta in salted boiling water until al dente.
2. Meanwhile, heat about a dessert spoon olive oil in a large frying pan, and when hot, fry the breadcrumbs until lightly browned.  
3. Turn the oven onto a low heat and warm two pasta bowls.
4. Just before the the pasta is cooked, reserve a small cup of the cooking water, then drain the pasta and blanch with boiling water.
5. Tip the pasta back into the pan you used for cooking it in, and put it on a low heat.
6. Add the mackerel, spring onions, chopped capers, rocket and cherry tomatoes, and stir thoroughly.
7. Season well with salt and pepper.
8. Add a little of the reserved cooking water to help the ingredients soften a little and coat the pasta. Start with about a tablespoon; add more if you think it needs it.  
9. Remove from the heat then stir in the parsley and crisped breadcrumbs.
10. Tip into the warmed bowls and serve immediately. 

Henry salad

Warning: This salad is not for vegetarians. 

This is Henry.

Henry (right)

 
Henry had a very happy and, for pigs destined to end up on our plate, long life (3). 

Apparently he was especially partial to custard creams. I'd like to say the sausages made from him tasted of custard creams, but they didn't. They tasted of Happy Pig. OK, they didn't, they tasted of sausages. But very, very good sausages.

Last week was the first Salad Club of the New Year. Our lovely freelancer Janey Stapes offered me some sausages made from her parent's pig, Henry. Since I've been trying to convince Salad Club of the merits of sausage and pumpkin salad for some time, this seemed like the ideal opportunity to try it out on them. 


In the end, though, we made much simpler salad, with the sausages being the only ingredient that needed cooking.  

Henry (after)

Henry Salad ingredients

Serves 12-14

• 24 Henry sausages*
• 1 jar marinated grilled mixed peppers
• 1 large punnet cherry tomatoes
• 2 cans chickpeas
• 1 bunch basil
• 2 packs feta cheese
• 1 bag baby spinach
• 1 bag rocket
• Chilli flakes, to taste
• Toasted sesame and pumpkin seeds, a sprinkle each

 *If you can't get hold of Henry sausages, use top quality butcher's sausages. That is, buy them from an actual butcher's, not a supermarket. Or even better, from someone who makes sausages. 

Cooking with Henry

Gabi adds the finishing touches

It was thought that Henry, being an old (and happy) pig, may have turned a bit sinewy, and so rather than making him into chops and joints, he was made ENTIRELY INTO SAUSAGES! If I were a pig, that's the way I'd want to go.

This meant that Henry sausages had a very high meat content. It also meant he had a higher fat content than you'd find in most sausages.To remove some of the fat, I roasted the sausages on a grill pan at about 200⁰C in the oven . After 15 minutes I pricked the sausages to let more fat drain out, then continued roasting for another 20 or so minutes. There was a lot of fat. But we all know that fat means flavour. 

If your sausages aren't of such a high meat and fat content (ie normal sausages), you probably don't need to prick them, just roast for 30-40 minutes, turning once during cooking, till most of the sausage is browned.

How to make Henry sausage salad

I normally twist my sausages into half or 3rds before baking them for salads. That way you get lots of little individual sausages, each with its own skin, to bite into. Henry was having none of that, spilling from his casing when I tried to twist the links. Instead I cooked the links whoe then cut each sausage into 2, 3 or 4 pieces, just to give some variety.


All you need to do to make this salad cut the tomatoes in half, rip the basil into small pieces, and mix everything together with the oil from the marinated peppers.

Put more dried chilli flakes out for people to help themselves, along with the toasted sesame and pumpkin seeds.

Andrea, Sausage nosed Jane, Robbie

A vegetarian pie with winter salads

OK, so a cheese-filled pie is probably not the healthiest start to the New Year, but this was for a special occasion when my brother- and sister-in-law and nephew came round for an after Christmas dinner.

However, I'm a great one for winter salads, and the 2 below are a nice way of using raw winter veg. I felt a little smug about the amount of vegetables I'd bought so thought I'd take a picture. 

 Before

Thanks to Nigella we all know that a messaluna means 'half moon' in Italian and is a semi-circular double blade for chopping herbs.

 Messaluna pie ingredients

• 1 pack filo pastry (approx 300g)
• 5 eggs
• A 200g pack spinach
• 2 leeks
• 1 stick celery
• 2 small handfuls rocket
• 1 large red onion
• 1 bunch dill
• 1/2 bunch parsley
• 3 spring onions
• 150g ricotta
• 100g feta
• 75g cheddar
• Oil, for frying and brushing

2 things I forgot to put in this pie but should be added:

• 1 teaspoon dried oregano
• 1 small bunch chives or 1 tablespoon freeze-dried chives

  How to make vegetable pie

1. Chop the red onion and celery finely and fry gently in some oil for about 5 minutes till beginning to soften without browning.
2. Meanwhile rinse the spinach in water.
3. Heat a large pan and add the spinach. Keep moving the spinach round till it is wilted down to almost nothing. 
4. Tip out of the pan into a colander and allow to cool.
5. Put the spinach into a clean cloth and squeeze out as much liquid as possible, then chop finely.
6. Break the eggs into a large bowl and beat.
7. Crumble in the feta and ricotta into the eggs and grate in the cheddar.
8. Grate the lemon zest into the mixture. 
9. Add the chopped spinach and the rocket.
10. Finely chop the spring onions and add to to the egg and cheese mixture. 
11. If using, add the finely chopped chives and the dried oregano.
12. Chop the herbs and add these to the egg mixture.
13. Season well with salt and pepper.
14. Brush a baking tin which is slightly smaller than the sheets of filo pastry lighly with oil. I used a 30x20cm tin.
15. Lay a sheet of pastry in the dish so that the ends hang over the outside of the dish then brush lightly with oil. It doesn't matter if the pastry breaks; just patch it up so that the dish is covered.
16. Repeat till half the sheets of pastry have been used.
17. Pour the filling mixture into the pastry.
18. Fold the overhanging pastry from the pie bottom on top of the filling.
19. Top with the remaining filo sheets, brushing each with oil before laying the next on top. Brush the final layer of pastry with oil too.
20. Bake at 190 degrees C for 30-40 minutes or till golden. 

Serve with chilli jam.

After

Red cabbage salad

Do not be tempted to make a larger quantity of this salad as it takes a lot of chewing, so you will probably get bored halfway through your leftovers.

• 1/8 red cabbage
• 1 pear
• 1 small handful walnuts
• A few pieces blue cheese
• Walnut oil
• Lemon juice
• Chopped parsley
• 1 dessertspoon mayonnaise
• 1 teaspoon yoghurt

To assemble the red cabbage salad:

1. Mix the mayonaise, yoghurt, lemon juice, walnut oil and chopped parsley in a bowl.
2. Shred the red cabbage finely and add to the mayo mixture.
3. Lightly toast the walnuts in a small frying pan over a low heat for about a minute.
4. Add the toasted walnuts to the cabbage.
5. Peel the pear and cut into thin slithers.
6. Add to the slaw and mix gently so the pears do not break but so everything is coated in the yoghurt mixture.

Leaf and root salad ingredients

• The rest of the rocket left over from the pie
• A handful watercress
• 1/4 grated raw parsnip
• 1/4 raw grated courgette
• A tablespoon sesame seeds, lightly toasted
• Olive oil
• Lemon juice

How to make leaf and root salad

1. In a bowl, dress the rocket and watercress with a drizzle of olive oil and a squeeze of lemon juice.
2. Arrange on a plate, and top with the grated courgette and parsnip.
3. Sprinkle the toaste sesame seeds over the top. 

Apple and rocket salad

I'm not a big fan of courgette and so the idea of it raw in a salad has never really appealed. For some reason, however, I decided to give it a try, and was gobsmacked: raw courgette is sweet and creamy, a million miles from the bitter watery cooked version. It makes me wonder why we ever bother to cook it at all. 

Based on this success, I have decided to incorporate it into a variety of salads.Here's one I made today to go with some lasagne and garlic bread.

Enough for 2 as a side salad.

 

Apple and rocket salad ingredients

• 1/2 small bunch rocket
• About 4 leaves little gem lettuce
• I banana shallot, finely chopped
• A 5cm piece cucumber, cut into thin matchsticks
• A 5cm piece courgette, cut into thin matchsticks
• 1 small English apple cut into thin matchsticks
• A small amount of blue cheese (I used Gorgonzola)

 

Apple and rocket salad dressing ingredients

• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• juice 1/2 lemon
• 1/2 teaspoon grain mustard

How to make apple and rocket salad

1. Mix all the dressing ingredients together in a small screwtop jar and shake well to combine
2. Rub a cut lemon over the apple as you slice it to prevent it from going brown.
3. Toss the leaves in the dressing.
4. Pile onto a large plate.
5. Sprinkle over the onion, followed by the cucumber, courgette and apple. 
6. Break up the blue cheese into very tiny morsels and scatter these over the salad.

A few toasted walnut pieces would have worked well in this salad too, but I didn't have any.

Pasta, prawns, peppers

Pasta is boring. It's what you eat at home when there's nobody else around. Its not something you serve to guests (unless you actually made the pasta yourself) and its not something you choose when eating out. It is lazy cooking. But it can be damn tasty.

If pasta recipes are as easy to write as they are to cook I may be about to enter an extremely prolific blogging phase.

Pasta with prawns and peppers (OK, plus a few more ingredients) 

• 2 small portions fusili pasta (wholewheat or tricolore)
• I bag raw king prawns
• 1/2 red pepper
• 1/2 yellow pepper
• 1/2 punnet cherry tomatoes
• 4 sundried tomatoes
• 1 bag rocket
• Chilli oil
• Unwaxed lemon, rind only

How to make pasta with prawns and a few other ingredients

 

1. Heat a little olive oil in a frying pan.
2. Cut the peppers into very thin strips and fry gently in the oil until they start to blacken a little at the edges -- about 5 minutes.
3. Add the pasta to a pan of boiling, salted water and set the timer for 3  minutes shorter than the cooking time given on the packet.
4. Chop the sundried tomatoes into very small pieces.
5. Cut the cherry tomatoes into a mixture of halves and quarters.
6. Add the prawns to the pan with the peppers and stir fry till pink and cooked through (about 4 minutes).
7. Drain the pasta and blanch with boiling water, reserving a tiny amount of the cooking water in a cup.
8. Put the pasta back in the saucepan, mix together with the peppers, prawns and tomatoes; season.
9. Add a little chilli oil, a little reserved cooking liquid and the rocket.
10. Toss until the rocket has wilted.
11. Serve with a little lemon rind grated over.

More pasta recipes:

Spag bol

Macaroni cheese