It’s time for a new recipe, and this one’s inspired by the unkempt winter mess of our front yard. We’ve boiled up whatever nettles we could find on the path to the letterbox to make a brilliant green dough, and then filled that with a simple, smooth mix of mascarpone, toasted walnut, and lemon zest. And it’s all served on a bitter bed of radicchio, sautéed in white wine, with crunchy cacciatore sprinkled on top.
And that’s another Tomato Day done and dusted! It’s been two years since I posted about this holiest of culinary days, and I almost let this one slide. After all, it’s just the same thing every year. You’ve all got the recipe. But then I looked through the photos and videos, and I was reminded of why we really do it, which is not about the tomatoes at all.
The past few years have been a wild, generally unpleasant family ride through chronic health issues, and we’re still just doing what we can to hang in there. Gluten-free is easy enough, and we’ve had great success adapting everything to GF (as you would have noticed in recent posts), and dairy-free is not too hard either (choking back your tears at not being able to drink grated pecorino straight from the bag when no one’s looking). But grain-free is a little trickier… So we’ve made things easier for ourselves by adding these gnocchi into regular rotation!
It’s been far too long since we’ve pulled a real Pasta et Al move! I’ve always wanted to put American mustard inside pasta, and I love any opportunity to provoke purists, so this week we are taking the flavours of the ubiquitously fantastic cheeseburger, and stuffing them into fagottini.
Our pasta is bobbing around in a tomato and bacon broth, with pickle juice stirred through. And our sesame seed dough is filled with a neat stack of American red cheddar, ketchup made from the strained broth tomatoes, mustard, and a mini beef hamburger patty containing the bacon from the broth.
Ciao! We’ve got a short and sweet one this week. We’ve finally turned our family-favourite spinach fettuccine gluten-free! Remember that, unlike glutinous dough, it won’t stretch well. It is squished together under pressure but will break if over-stressed, which could easily by my one-line biography.
It’s been a while since we tried out something a little different, so this week we’re taking a love of dumplings and colourful things, and mixing that with pasta in our Japanese-inspired pork, banana prawn, and shiso casoncelli. These are made with a matcha dough, served in a rib and red radish broth, and garnished with sour plum, puffed quinoa, and fried shiso leaves.
Guten Tag pasta pals! I am extremely excited to announce that Pasta et Al has been translated into German and is available now for pre-order, ahead of its release on 1 June! My sincere thanks to Gerstenberg Verlag for believing in us, and to Melanie Goldmann for the incredible work that has gone into the translation. I hope that our new audience enjoys reading it as much as we enjoyed making it. Preorder is currently available from Thalia Online and Amazon Germany.
It’s that time of the year again! Back in the early days of Pasta et Al, we began the tradition of dreaming up a special pasta dish for Mother’s Day. This time around we’ve made a dough of limoncello and toasted perilla seeds, and turned it into doppio ravioli and agnolotti, filled with caramelised fig and mascarpone, goat cheese, and walnut. For a bit of fun, our agnolotti are nested inside the giant doppio ravs, in a delicious brown butter of walnut, limoncello, and apple cider vinegar, served with pomegranate molasses, freeze-dried blueberries, pink peppercorns, and a few edible flowers.
It’s time for a post that we’ve been working on for a little while now. In fact, it’s been in the works for around 6 months. Near the end of last year, we decided to build a little seedling nursery in the garage, and teach ourselves how to grow a whole heap of perfect chillies. This is a step-by-step guide — everything you need to know — of how to grow your own!
You’d know by now that Pasta et Al is all about mindful food. We source locally and seasonally, and buy all things grass-fed, free-range, unpackaged, and covered in soil. And when we’re not making pasta, we grow things, ferment things, jar things, and spend a lot of our time talking about things like permaculture, aquaponics, silvopasture, microbiomes, and regenerative agriculture. We’re a little bunch of passionate food-loving nerds, and this week we’re delighted to introduce our equally passionate regen ag friends at Dirty Clean Food.