Some Vietnamese grub

Looking good Reg.

SG, you've inspired me today. I've just made cray fish and lemon linguine in the style of that video. Garlic and chilli softened in some olive oil, add some flat leaf parsley, zest and juice of a lemon and some cray fish, then add the pasta when it's nearly done. Toss it around for a bit, whacked in a bit of parmigiano, toss it a bit more and it's done.

It was a hit.

I love spaghetti vongole but finding clams round here isn't easy. I normally have to resort to using muscles.

Looking at the Charcuterie section and seeing the mortadella has made me want to make cappelletti again. I love Italian food, I think I need to do a food holiday there soon. I would be so happy shacked up in a little villa close to a nice town with a good market. Just nipping in to town in the morning to buy ingredients and then cooking dinner and eating alfresco with a nice bottle of wine or two, and spending the rest of the time catching up on my reading or in the pool.

Gay pesto?

GooberTheHat wrote:

Looking good Reg. SG, you've inspired me today. I've just made cray fish and lemon linguine in the style of that video. Garlic and chilli softened in some olive oil, add some flat leaf parsley, zest and juice of a lemon and some cray fish, then add the pasta when it's nearly done. Toss it around for a bit, whacked in a bit of parmigiano, toss it a bit more and it's done. It was a hit.

I've got a pasta skill exercise for you. It's as simple as it gets really (wax on wax off me wise man). Make spaghetti with just olive oil, salt and pepper. Not even any garlic. You'll need a frying pan exclusively for tossing. Ignore that lots of boiling water bollocks and half cook your pasta in half the water you normally would (stir it with tongs to stop it sticking) and tong it into the empty hot frying pan. Add lots of pepper and some salt and a couple of ladles of the pasta water. keep tossing, adding more water until it's not quite cooked.Then add some olive oil, some more water and toss like a mental until it's slightly more al dente then you would normally have it and toss some more, maybe or maybe not with more water. Check seasoning and serve. 

It only costs about 30p a portion so practice until it's the best pasta you've ever made.

That was pretty damn good TBF, and I say that as someone who isn’t generally enamoured of olive oil.

I added some Parmesan and it may even have made it worse, which is almost inconceivable when it comes to pasta.

I tried tossing pasta and threw tomatoes and garlic all over myself. I'll stick to stirring.

At the breakfast club for some bloody marys and brunch

Mmm egg shell coated eggs nestled on a bed of weeds in a baseball mitt.

Ten minutes

Barshu is Szechuan food that does not fuck around

Was at the Whisky Lounge do at the Oval today and fuck me if they didn't have a Mother Flipper burg stand outside, summat that's been on my to-scoff list for ages.

The candy bacon burg was entirely fucking good.

Yossarian wrote:

That was pretty damn good TBF, and I say that as someone who isn’t generally enamoured of olive oil. I added some Parmesan and it may even have made it worse, which is almost inconceivable when it comes to pasta.

Well done sir. It normally takes a few goes to get right, but it's a bit of a revelation when done properly, or it was to me at least. It tastes of something that is normally lost behind a sauce. It tastes of pasta, and by that I mean wheat.  

Once you've got it nailed you can try a simple tomato sauce. You do the same thing but fry sliced garlic in oil, add a can of decent tomatoes, maybe San Marzano, mashing the plum tomatoes in the frying pan with a old fashioned potato masher while it's on the heat. maybe add a sprinkle of dried chillies or a shitload of pepper. It should take about five mins. You don't have to worry about your tomato sauce not being thick as long as there are no huge lumps of plum tomato. The half-cooked pasta will absorb the liquid and thicken it anyway, to the extent you'll need extra pasta water like before. Toss like mad, add a bit more oil, toss like mad again. You'll have a feel for it after making the olive oil one.

Then you move on to cacio e pepe, which is pretty much the same but with cheese and a lot of pestle and mortar pepper. Anyway you get the idea. Next do it with pesto, in the same way but with green sauce, blah blah blah. The nailing it with oil, salt and pepper is the hard bit, and when you make that again and again you'll start dressing your pasta rather than saucing it, whatever sauce. It's hard to imagine the pasta is the important bit until you've tasted pasta, which is rare as fuck because who makes pasta with just oil and seasoning?

But I’ll certainly try stepping it up a bit. I tried the basic one again tonight but accidentally added almond oil as well as olive. It didn’t work so great.