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On Saturday afternoon I caught up with a friend for beers in Surry Hills. After a few hours of drinking and talking technology (will the iPad dominate?) we decided that the only logical thing to do given both of us were hungry and both of us were three quarters drunk, was to go back to his and cook up a storm for the three of us (him, me and my wife).
Still full of confidence after serving it for others at a dinner party last weekend, my mate dictated that dinner ought be agnolloti stuffed with sweet potato and bacon with a butter sage sauce, and beforehand we should snack on salmon tartare tweel cones with red onion and crème fraiche. ”Shounds like a plan”, I said – and got off my stool and swayed towards the door of the bar. We were tired and emotional, and about to go fire up hot ovens and whirling blades in food processors.
What could possibly go wrong?
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.
I recently bought a Neil Perry cookbook that I think is awesome. Generally speaking if you can find two recipes in a cookbook that you’d be willing to cook at all, and one you’d be willing to cook regularly, that’s the highest standard you are likely to find in cookbooks.
This Neil Perry’s “Good Food” has two I wouldn’t be willing to cook at all, and one that makes me totally screw my face up. It’s absolutely great.
Last night was valentine’s day, and while we don’t usually make that much of a fuss on the day I thought it’d be nice to cook something a bit special rather than just normal fare. My wife had been leafing through the book and appeared to particularly lick her lips at orecchiette with braised cauliflower, broccoli and pumpkin so I gave it a whirl. It was nice, as was the wine, but whether it needs a “something else” to kick it up I’m not sure. It certainly has a promise in the recipe that it’ll be above and beyond, but it could just be that I didn’t adjust the recipe from four servings to two very well. Anyway, here’s what I did which is almost to the Perry recipe, it produces a delicious meal even if it’s not what you’d expect at Rockpool.
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.
