A Simple Meal, In More Than One Way

Tonight’s dinner was pasta with Arrabiata sauce and meatballs; a really, really simple meal.  What makes this blog-worthy (at least as far as I’m concerned) is that the meal was simple not just because it had few ingredients and was not challenging to make, it was made out of incredibly high quality ingredients that had minimal interference from people.  Biodynamic beef mince, pasta from an Australian independent producer (I’d originally intended to handmake pasta but was out of 00 flour), organic pasta sauce and carrots, onions and herbs from a local, small independent retailer.

None of this meal was produced with the input of large chain supermarkets which have a sole priority of driving down prices by purchasing the largest available quantities from factory farms and large scale producers.  It was good not just because it was delicious, but because it wasn’t tangled up in a situation that I don’t really like.

Linguine Carbonara is the Easiest Lunch Ever

It’s difficult to flesh it out much more than the title.  It’s easy, stupid easy.  In fact if you were to have a girl around to your place to cook her dinner and you cooked this and made some garlic bread and got a bottle of wine and a salad, I reckon you’d be a chance for a back rub after dinner and it’d be the easiest meal for two you’ve ever cooked.

As a side note, stop buying bad pasta.  You shouldn’t do it.  The standard 500g dried pastas that you get from Coles and Woolworths (in particular their generic brands) are tasteless rubbish.  The best results but most effort is your own fresh pasta made from type 00 flour and eggs, but if you are going to buy dried pasta get something produced on a smaller scale from an independent producer.  The stuff in the picture is “Aussie Gold Premium Wheat Linguine” and has a very wheaty flavour to it, it’s $3.85 for 300g as opposed to the $1.60 – $2.00 / 500g pastas in supermarkets.  It’s really worth it.

Carbonara is derived from the Italian word for charcoal but that’s about all we know for sure.  Things like this are absolutely drenched in urban myths from some saying that the it was made for the charcoal men (a secret society that helped unify Italy) through to it originally containing squid ink (making it the colour of charcoal).  There are also fights over what it should contain, but my recipe gives it the basics and it’s delicious.

Blueberry and Cinnamon Panna Cotta

Hot weather desserts are tricky.  No cakes or anything that will run the oven too hot in a Sydney summer (and hence heat the house up worse),  a lot of people revert to ice cream with chocolate topping or fruit salad.

I love panna cottas, they’re a really rather simple thing to make but I think the result is fantastic.  My wife introduced me to them a couple of years ago at the Taste of Tasmania festival in Hobart which is in my opinion the best festival nation wide for celebrating food.

The best thing about them other than the taste, is the fact that they are a blank slate.  Any selected combination of flavours can be expressed neatly in a panna cotta – I make blueberry and cinnamon ones but they are a bit of an open canvas.  I’ve almost got a shortlist of what I want to try in terms of panna cotta flavours and I’ll probably get through all of them by the end of the warmer weather;

• Honey and Rosemary
• Rasperries and Rum
• Pecan and Bourbon and
• Blood orange

But for now, here’s how to make the blueberry and cinnamon ones;