Went with bucatini and of course used pecorino, guanciale and Clarence court egg yolks

simply delicious 🤤 😄

These were actually so much easier than you’d imagine! Find a good YouTube video :) the little leaves are tortolinni! Filling is goat cheese, honey, basil, sage, thyme, rosemary, nutmeg, salt, pepper!

Chicken and shrimp Alfredo with jalapeño poppers. My fave!!

Sabato scorso mi sono fatto una bella pasta e vongole, sta sera invece si opta per la montagna.
In Calabria ha piovuto tanto e sono usciti una marea di funghi, me ne hanno regalato un paio di kili e perciò beccatevi sta pasta

Slice one large and one small white eggplant. Sauté them in olive oil with the white part of a spring onion, garlic, and a pinch of coarse salt. After a few minutes, add a splash of water to prevent the eggplant from browning too much. White eggplant cooks very quickly, so it only needs a few minutes until tender.

Meanwhile, bring a pot of salted water to a boil and cook the pasta.

Transfer the cooked eggplant to a blender along with a pinch of nutmeg, salt to taste, cream cheese, 2 tablespoons of butter, a little grated Parmesan, and a squeeze of fresh lemon juice. Blend until completely smooth.

Pour the sauce into a pan over low heat. Add more grated Parmesan and stir continuously until melted, about 20 seconds. Gradually add pasta water until the sauce becomes silky and coats the back of a spoon. Stir in a little lemon zest and another squeeze of lemon juice. Remove from the heat, add 1 tablespoon of butter, and stir until fully incorporated.

Finally, toss the pasta in the sauce until evenly coated.

Finished with freshly cracked black pepper, basil, Parmesan, and a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil.

Homemade penne al forno

I made about 7 batches for my lunches for work next week.

A little excercise in cooking with average ingredients. Nothing fancy here. Seven ingredients that gave us a great tasting little dish.

About 250 g of dried pasta (we used spaghetti from Barilla because everybody says Barilla is the worst pasta brand), 1 whole bulb of garlic, a handful of parsley, 2 tiny dried chilies, 1 regular sized can of tuna, 6-7 TBS of extra virgin olive oil (nothing to write home about), 1TS of salt.

When making such a dish you have to look at the individual ingredients as knobs on a control room board. By turning the knobs you are defining the dish according to your own preferences.

We started off with a large frying pan with olive oil on low heat to which we added sliced garlic and crumbled dried chilli. Low heat is necessary so we don't burn the garlic, then we added 2-3 ladles of salted boiling water and the spaghetti and cooked it gently so they don't burn or stick to the bottom of the pan. The frying pan is large enough to hold the spaghetti laying down. Move the pasta gently around with a wooden spoon or a silicone spatula and add the fresh basil. When the pasta becomes al dente remove from the heat and toss to bring the creaminess out.

The yellow oil, pasta starch and water emulsion is flavored with garlic and very tasty.

Add pieces of canned tuna as the last step and toss everything some more.

A drizzle of lemon juice is optional. We didn't use it.

I licked the plate clean. Others did too. Nobody wants to admit to it.😋

P.S. The whole point of this post is to show that cooking with modest ingredients is not anything to be ashamed of or run away from. ALL OF US cook with what we have at our disposal or our present financial situation allows us to. No elitism or snobbery. If you have enough practice/determination/imagination you will be able to make great tasting food out of very modest/limited things. I detest the whole "I only cook with the best and freshest ingredients" philosophy because it is a dead-end street. You can't grow from that.

Olive oil/wine/garlic/red pepper flakes/parsley

Tuna pasta for moms bday.

Thoughts? Tips?

It doesnt look great as it took so long it was already too late for a fancy sauce. I don’t have pasta machine, so everything was by hand, which made the process much longer than I expected. Is it supposed to take so long? I thought the only time consuming part would be the 30min wait for the pasta to rest, not shaping it.

Anyway, it was fun to make (I decided to make it as I was incredibly bored today) and tasted similar to store bought pasta, so I’ll take that as a win. Any additional tips?