Spaghetti with cherry tomatoes, creme fraiche and bottarga

Bottarga's a bit of a funny one. Incredibly expensive (an entire dried roe in a Bologna Deli whose price I enquired was valued at over forty euroes), and strongly redolent of fish food in its little jar, it sits in the cupboard waiting for moments such as this. It's a luxury item like truffle oil that's best saved for an occasional treat. Used judiciously and simply (like truffle oil) it gives an extra kick to standard dishes. For this combination try and get hold of very sweet cherry tomatoes and cook them slowly to give a wonderful flavoursome sauce.

• cherry tomatoes
• olive oil
• a few cloves of garlic, chilli flakes
• bottarga
• creme fraiche

The key here is to give the tomatoes plenty of time - be generous with the olive oil and garlic and patient with the cooking time. They will break down and form a wonderful sauce. Add chilli flakes to taste.

Serve with a dab of creme fraiche and a sprinkle of bottarga. These can then be mixed on the plate to make a beautifully rich but simple sauce.

Some fine parmesan may or may not be gilding the lilly. You decide.

Pasta with roast cauliflower and pumpkin

Cheap cauliflower is a boon. It's one of those vegetables (like aubergines) that isn't often had for bargains on markets. When you see some cheap snap it up, take it home and roast it. I was prompted to roast mine by this post. I did it slightly differently, but the great thing is if you cook loads you can then have it in the fridge and ready to use in different things - a little side dish, the basis of a salad (would be great with chickpeas, turnips and preserved lemons) or, as here, with pasta.

• cauliflower
• pumpkin
• garlic, chilli flakes, cinnamon, olive oil
• pasta

Roast your cauli: in florets, with butter and salt. It will need half an hour - forty-five minutes on a medium heat.

Make the sauce: fry lots of garlic in olive oil and add the pumpkin chopped small with a little twig of cinnamon. Chuck in some chilli flakes. Put a little water in there and add a lid. Allow this all to cook down for ten or fifteen minutes, using your spoon to mash the pumpkin into a sauce. You don't need loads here - it's designed to lubricate the pasta and augment the cauliflower. If your pumpkin is anaemic and lacking taste, as mine was - from our communal garden, sprinkle a little veg stock on.

When the pumpkin is well cooked and the sauce has come together de-engage the cinnamon and discard. It has done an important job here - a slight sweetness that boosts the pumpkin and bonds with the chilli. Stir into your pasta and toss in the cauliflower. Anoint with oil or bless with parmesan as you see fit.

Yes. Sheer niceness. Where the cauliflower browns against the metal of the tray you are rewarded with a wonderful sweetness, whilst the roasting in general gives the vegetable a savour not attained through boiling or steaming. It gains an almost truffle like richness which combines with the pumpkin to make a wonderful sauce.

Cabbage, pasta, parmesan and chickpea soup

Like parsimonious Italian grannies, in my flat we've been saving the rinds of spent blocks of partisan for a moment such as this. Now they come to the fore and truly become themselves. Soup. To be specific, a kind of minestrone x pasta e fagioli bastard, miscegenation born of necessity. The cabbage, pasta, parmesan and chickpeas are the backbone of this dish - feel free to experiment with the other ingredients but I think these four should remain as the central pillars around which the flavour is woven. If you have some white wine to hand why not add a small glass to the pot?

• an onions and some garlic
• one cabbage
• one tin chickpeas (or other beans)
• parmesan
• vegetable stock
• pasta
• olive oil
• dried chilli
• fresh basil (not crucial)

Chop your onions and garlic and cook in olive oil. Give them ten minutes or so to get properly translucent and nice. Add the parmesan rinds and some dried chilli.

Introduce stock, a shredded cabbage and a tin of chickpeas. A couple of minutes later put in some pasta (don't go mad with the amounts - it should compliment and not dominate the rest of the ingredients). Cook for ten to fifteen minutes and make sure everything is cooked. Now is not an al dente time. Season, add more olive oil if needed and stir in some grated parmesan. Add some basil at the end if you have some, it's not a big deal if you don't

This soup is a great example of a combination which exalts its humble components beyond the store-cupboard. The chickpeas and pasta give it main-meal heft, the cabbage gives you vegetable goodness and the parmesan, chilli and garlic keep things interesting. You could posh it up a bit bit that qualifies as gilding the lilly in my book.

On holiday in Venice and Sarajevo

I've not been ignoring the blog I promise. I've been on a summer holiday. First we were in Venice for their art festival the Biennale and then on (via overnight trains and a day of zombie-transit in Zagreb) to Sarajevo to the superb, yearly film festival. Here are some food highlights and snapshots.

coloured pasta in the tourist shops in Venice

no escape from the kebab

 a wonderful marble like statue - actually a giant candle

Italy is of course well famous for its food; the Balkans less so. Even now the Balkans in general and Sarajevo in particular make people think of the 1992-96 war  that followed the collapse of Yugoslavia and was the most biggest conflict in Europe since WWII.

15 years later and of course the city is very different, although you can still see the bullet trails on the buildings. It's definitely changed in the year I've been coming  to the film festival.

Bosnians love coffee. Every corner has a place selling it. Often you can get an espresso or a Bosnian coffee which is brewed in little copper pots with the grounds like its Turkish cousin. You can also get a cappuccino in lots of places should that be your wish.

One of the other things Sarajevo does very well is pastries. The ubiquitous boreks are everywhere - a bit like giant coiled sausage rolls but with lamb - but the vegetarian equivalents are probably a bit nicer and definitely less greasy. Buying a sirnica will get you the same pastry with a mashed up cheese filling (like feta), zeljanica is the same cheese with spinach and krompiruša contains potato. The tried and tested spinach and cheese combo is delicious, whilst the potato is a bit hard going when combined with the pastry.

  

You can buy corn on the street for one KM (convertible mark).

Pizza in Sarajevo is the business! there are a few places in the centre where you can get slices of the proper stone-baked stuff

The Balkans are not great if you don't eat meat. Omelette, lots of cheese, some nice simple salads, pastas and sandwiches are all available for vegetarians but if you sit down to a proper meal and are after proper evening food its a bit thin on the ground. Typical Bosnian food includes hearty meat stews as above. A little bit of spice, lots of tomato and onion and some beef or veal cooked for quite a long time.

Best enjoyed with salad and a delicious unsweetened yoghurt drink.

As well as coffee (and despite a large Muslim population, many of whom are pretty secular) beer is also everywhere. At the Saraveo Pivara, an old brewery, you can get light, un-filtered light and dark beer in about five sizes ranging from 0.1l to one litre bad boy steins.

Bosnian bread is so much better than Italian! This is somun  and is the absolute business. Elastic, pure white dough with a slight blackening on the bottom and a sprinkle of black sesame seeds on top.

The bakeries in Sarajevo are amazing, loads of top-notch fresh stuff every morning.

We enjoyed it with some spreadable cheese that was also wicked.

On the last day we kept things simple.

Tagliatelle with guanciale and leek

I got some goodies in Bologna a few weeks ago and wanted to try this guanciale I got, along with  bottarga (tuna, not the phenomenally expensive mullet version) and a fat rock of parmesan, from a nice looking deli. It's made from the cured jowl of a pig and I had never had it before.

This is just a simple pasta combo - the meat has a deep, almost dusty savouriness to it, the leeks offer a bit of greenery and the chilli and garlic (plus some parmesan and black pepper at the end) complete the savoury megamix.

Ingredients (for one)

• eight fat matchsticks of guanciale
• one garlic clove
• one pinch dried chilli
• one medium leek
• one big grate parmesan

Fry the guanciale. The fat has an amazing perlescent quality and becomes translucent when heated. I recommend going through the translucent stage and well into the stage of crisp - it's going to be a but rubbery otherwise. Some of the fat renders out and will coat the pasta if boosted with a drop of olive oil (definitely time to bring out the extra-spesh-extra-virgin).

When this is half way done add the leek to soften. I like a lot of leek and wish I had put more in but this is at your discretion naturally! Add the garlic and chilli half way through the leek softening. When everything is looking good add to some cooked pasta (you’ve had that on the boil all this time, right?) and things should be looking lovely.

Sweet

Pasta e fagioli

Fiending for a cheap and cheery soup fix I trawled my Google reader archives and found this excellent looking recipe for Pasta e fagioli. As a peasant dish I think the ingredients are fairly flexible and I was happily able to make something from the stuff in my cupboard and fridge. Out went the bolotti beans and in came the chickpeas. Some beautiful tiny tomatoes went in instead of a whole tin and a crumbled dried chilli or two subbed for the fresh one. Also a drop of cream left over from the pheasants. What’s good here is that if you include a decent amount of pasta it becomes a meal in itself. The gentle crushing of the veg releases enough starch to thicken the liquid which raises wholesomeness and satisfaction levels.

The ingredients can be found in the link. I added some extra parmesan at the end and only roughly followed the recipe but can confirm it a good one. Thanks rachel eats!

Bolognese sauce

There seems to be much made over what exactly goes into a Bolognese ragu. Milk or no milk, pork or no pork, red or white wine, lots of tomatoes or just a few. After doing a bit of reading on it I decided to give it a go with an emphasis on a strong meat flavour (to be provided by bacon, beef mince and chicken livers), a relatively modest amount of tomato, milk and a long cooking period. There seem to be fans of both red and white wine, I used white for a change to see how it was.

Ingredients

• onion, carrot and celery
• beef mince, chicken livers and bacon in a ratio of 3:1:1
• dried herbs (thyme and oregano for me)
• tin of tomatoes
• large glass wine and same amount of whole milk
• olive oil
  
  

The vegetables are first softened in olive oil for fifteen minutes or so with a little garlic. Some bacon scraps were browned and added to the vegetables, as was the mince and the chopped chicken livers. I then allowed this to all cook down for ten minutes. Then the wine and milk were added and dried thyme and oregano added to the mix. It was slightly grey at this point and did not in fact look hugely attractive.

After a couple of hours the sauce had started to look a bit more together, although still far from the glossy red more normally seen. Some penne, a twist of salt and pepper and some parmesan finished things off. It was good but not mind-blowing. So, any tips or tricks for making a top notch version?

Leek vinaigrette and open pasta

Leeks are wonderful - cheap and tasty, humble and trusty - they loose any allium harshness given a quick poach. I followed Simon Hopkinsons's directions from his Roast Chicken and Other Stories book in pairing them with boiled egg. He suggested grating the egg but I just sliced it.

Very retro dish this one, and incredibly tasty. The vinaigrette is a simple one with lots of Dijon mustard and red-wine vinegar and thinned with a little water.

Given  a post-Ridley Road glut of tomatoes and peppers (this time cherry toms and those small, very sweet orange pointed peppers) I opted to roast them and make an open, messy pasta dish with some lasagna sheets.

The veg was roasted for fifty odd minutes with a lick of olive oil and some garlic. Once nice and soft and crinkly the tomatoes were squashed with a fork to make a sauce and Parmesan grated in. This gives a wonderfully savoury sauce to hold the larger pieces of pepper. It was then layered up with the pasta.

It looks nicer a bit mashed up really. Some capers and olive oil and then you're ready to go! Wicked taste.

PS Used leftover roasted veg to make lunches for the week.

Added to bulgar (such an amazing grain - the perfect mouthfeel mix of nutty chew and gluten squidge and healthy to boot!) with dried chilli, green olives, the much-loved preserved lemon, parsley, leftover poached leek and a few mushrooms. Given sufficiently robust seasoning and some strong flavours such as olives or capers bulgar can complement anything and makes a great, cheap lunch.