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Spaghetti carbonara
One thing to remember about great Italian cooking is that there is nothing over the top about it. No tricks of presentation – no sprigs of parsley here, nor judiciously laid leaves of chervil there – just readily available, simple flavours, cooked with gusto, spirit and plenty of love. Love for the raw ingredients, love [...]
Tagliatelle with blackened scallops
Once you’ve done that, you’ll want to show off with it, and when you show off, it usually means you spend money. That means seafood. Prawns and scallops are just wonderful tossed through simple buttered noodles, and they take a quantum leap into glory when you douse them with spices, hit them in a red-hot [...]
Tagliatelle with sugar peas in a lemon butter sauce
One sure way to succeed with pasta is to return absolutely to basics, to childhood, to that frantic time after school when you’d pulled out the bread and butter and had to decide what to put on it. That first lesson of associating flavours has never left me. Later on it was bread and butter [...]
Lambs’ kidneys with buttery noodles
Lambs’ kidneys are at their most delicious when lambs are young and lovely; when grass is green and plentiful, the weather is warm and the lambs are pretty happy with their life, such as it is.
Angel’s hair pasta with baby beans
Special food has as much to do with visuals as it has with expensive ingredients. I guess this is one of the reasons why so many bright young chefs have so much fun fiddling with food. The consequences have been wonderful, save a minor period of misuse, and a major attack of misjudgement by many [...]
Pasta with a sauce from the garden
The garden is such a fantastic inspiration, summer or winter, hot or cold, I wonder why we bother with recipes. Kick the mint and the air is filled with mint sauce, and roast lamb is a natural to follow. Rush into the kitchen and cook it.
Fondle the rosemary and all those delicious oils are released: [...]
Baked noodles in a bacon, leek and walnut sauce
I have read a lot about Italian cooking, eaten a lot of Italian cooking, here and there and at home. And I can’t help but feel that Italians love their food, but cook without much spontaneity, preferring the tried and true, almost to the stage of admonishment if certain procedures are not followed. Gual-tiero [...]
Pasta with smoked salmon in a smoky sauce
Smoked fish makes a delightful companion for pasta, for the same reasons as bacon does. It imparts an intense, smoky flavour to its carrier, the cream, and some delicious chunky bits to float through the pasta. The way to go is to use one set of chunks to flavour the cream, and a new, uncooked [...]
A Simple Pasta: Tagliatelle in a Bacon Cream Sauce
You approach restaurants with extraordinary naivety. The day we opened our one and only eating house we had two pasta dishes on the menu. We made the pasta in the early hours of the morning we opened, just after we had finished hand-churning the ice cream. Husband and wife, not long married and still wide-eyed [...]
Some Kitchen ‘Rules’
The best thing I did in the early days of cooking was to learn to make perfect pastry cream. I learned something else as well: always read new recipes right through before trying them on.