All in good taste
Cooking is the ultimate way to reconnect with reality after spending your day wrestling with abstract concepts in the library. Shut off your brain, work with your hands and forget all about deadlines for a while.
Welcome to the first edition of my recipe page. The goal here is to compete with the ubiquitous Iceland frozen dinner. The recipes here all cost more or less the same per serving, and the servings will be considerably bigger too, because I happen to rather like eating. This would typically cause you to end up in a disagreement with your trouser buttons, unless the food you stuff your face with is actually healthy. Fortunately, this is the kind of food that you don’t have to feel guilty about eating. Need I mention that it also tastes better than any frozen dinner?
Here’s a simple recipe that you can use to deceive your friends into thinking that you are a considerably better cook than you actually may be. Combine olives, rosemary and lemon with a complete absence of tomatoes, and you have a pasta sauce that is quite unusual. Give it a go if you entertain even the slightest suspicion that there may be more to pasta than Bolognese and Carbonara.
Cooking time: 40 minutes
Ingredients (Serves 2 big eaters):
1 onion
2 cloves of garlic
250 ml half cream
1 tin of tuna steak in brine
100 g green olives (de-seeded, preferably stuffed with lemon or pepper)
2 tablespoons of dried rosemary
1 lemon
250 g pasta
olive oil
1. Start out by chopping onions and garlic finely. Heat up some olive oil in a pan. Medium heat is the goal here: when the oil becomes a bit runny it’s warm enough, if it starts smoking it’s too hot.
2. Add onion and garlic, and stir once every minute. You’re not looking to brown anything. Amaze your friends with your multi-tasking skills as you open the tuna between stirs. Don’t drain it though; we’ll use the brine.
3. When the onion is getting a little soft, add the cream and tuna.
4. Turn the heat down a bit: the sauce should be simmering, not boiling. Thanks to the lower heat you should only have to stir occasionally from this point on.
5. Add the rosemary immediately after adjusting the heat. Massage your lemon a bit before slicing it in half and pressing half of it – the fondling will make the juices come out a bit more easily. In case you’re wondering what to do with the remaining half lemon, try slicing it up and use it to garnish your beverage. You’ll look very sophisticated unless it’s lager.
6. Fill another pan with water and crank up the heat. Drain and slice those olives while you wait for the water to boil, but don’t put them in the sauce just yet.
7. When the water starts boiling, add salt until the boiling starts sounding different. Weird, but it works. Also add a bit of olive oil, to prevent foaming, before you put in the pasta.
8. Pasta manufacturers seem to believe that people prefer wheat porridge to pasta. Keep this in mind when you read the suggested boiling time. “Al dente” means “for teeth” in Italian, and this is what you want to go for here. The pasta should not be crunchy, but it should have texture. If the cooking instruction says 10 minutes, taste the pasta after 7 minutes. More often than not, it’s done.
9. As the pasta boils, add a bit of salt and pepper to the sauce, and do that one special thing that separates the chef from your average lunch-lady: taste the sauce. All is not lost even if it’s too spicy or salty at this point, simply add more cream. Keep in mind though that you’ll be adding a pile of quite mild pasta to the sauce, so the sauce on its own can be a bit spicier than you might think.
10. When your pasta is drained, mix it in with the sauce and the sliced olives. Serve immediately.
