Occasional recipes: conchiglie with chickpeas

As promised last week, here is what you do with the other half of the jar of sun-dried tomatoes. And, now you’ve used the whole jar, you can use the marinating oil (topped with the fresh olive variety) to fry the onions and garlic to start with.

You also, as the eagle-eyed among you will note, don’t have to use conchiglie if you don’t have any. Just do get a kind that is vaguely enclosed and therefore retains bits of the sauce as you transport them to your mouth.

As before; cook the pasta and the sauce ingredients at the same time; don’t forget to spoon the pasta with liberal amounts of pasta water into the sauce; and leave them all to blend, bubbling and glooping gently, while you enjoy a preliminary G&T. Or two.

Occasional recipes: sun-dried tomato sauce and tagliatelle

I’ll be honest, most of my favourite pasta dishes you could probably just buy the non-pasta elements in a pre-made sauce, heat them up and mix them in with the pasta. But it’s more fun to chop them and fry them and at least pretend like you’re doing high cuisine.

Thus, this one. I pretty well go with what it says in the recipe. You can start cooking the pasta at the same time as you start cooking the ingredients; both will be ready at pretty much the same time. A personal taste touch is to spoon the pasta into the sauce (thus transferring random amounts of pasta sauce into the mix, always helpful for an extra delicacy to the flavour) and then leave them all to blend together while  you have your G&T.

This also uses only about half the contents of a standard jar of sun-dried tomatoes. What you do with the other half – well, that’s next week.

 

Occasional recipes: Fennel and feta linguine

This is a naughty and nifty little recipe from Nigel Slater, very quick and easy to make: you can do all the preparing while the pasta cooks in its pan. Done carefully, the fennel and the onion together sizzle away into something just hard enough to put up a token resistance in your mouth while giving you a hit of caramelised liquorice; meanwhile the feta hits you with a salty blast that stops the whole thing just being too darn sweet.

He says linguine, we use tagliatelle. Either way, do not let it overcook: if it goes slithering out of the holes in the colander, you know you should have taken it off the heat earlier. However, I have recently discovered that food with pasta tastes far nicer if you don’t drain the pasta, but instead use tongs or a slotted spoon to lift it out of the boiling water and drop it into the rest. This brings with it a good quantity of pasta-flavoured water which adds a delicacy to the whole melange of flavours.

The recipe is here. Mostly what he says, except:

He says I say
1 fennel bulb for 2 people It actually serves 3 quite nicely.
1 banana shallot 1 banana, 2 banana, 3 banana, 4 … I have actually never heard of a banana shallot, and any kind of onion is fine.
200g linguine Maybe it’s because we use tagliatelle instead, but 75g per head is fine.
Tear the basil over the fennel and shallot and crumble in the feta. Well, you could … I however would mix the pasta in to the onion + fennel mix, then let it simmer on a diffuser over a low flame while you enjoy a preprandial G&T. To preserve the distinctiveness of their contribution to the mix, only mix in the basil and feta just before serving.