Creamy Mushroom Tagliatelli, Crispy Prosciutto and Zingy Rocket

Hi Guys,

This is bit of a big moment for me. After years of doing other people's recipes (well  . . . . Jamie's) I have started to come up with my own. This is the first one that I wanted to share with you, it's a simple and quick pasta dish that is totally delicious. Give it a go and tell me what you think. Vegetarians can just leave out the prosciutto.

Serves 2

4 slices prosciutto or parma ham

300g mushrooms - I like shittakke, but it's up to you

1 clove garlic, finely sliced

good pinch of crumbled dried chilli - but adjust to your taste

a few sprigs of fresh thyme, leaves picked

250g tagliatelle

1 heaped tablespoon mascarpone cheese

zest and juice of half a lemon

a big handful of rocket

olive oil and extra virgin olive oil

sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

parmesan for grating

Heat a large frying pan on a medium-high heat and add a little olive oil. Put your kettle on to boil and put a large saucepan on the hob. Once the frying pan is hot, add your prosciutto and fry on both sides until golden and crispy, then remove from the pan but keep the small amount of beautiful leftover oil in, as this will add an incredible flavour to your mushrooms.

Tear or slice your mushrooms in half and add to the pan with a touch more olive oil, give the pan a little toss.

Once the mushrooms get a little colour on them add the finely sliced garlic, the dried chilli and the thyme leaves, everything will start to smell amazing.

Toss everything in the pan for a few minutes until the garlic has softened and has a nice golden colour. If the pan starts to look a little dry, add a touch more oil.

Pour the boiling water from the kettle into the saucepan and add a good pinch of salt and the pasta.
Cook the pasta according to the packet instuctions, until al dente.

Once the pasta goes in, turn the heat down under the mushrooms and add the mascarpone. Once the mascarpone is half melted, add a ladle of the water from the pasta pan. This will not only stop your finished pasta from going claggy and sticky, it adds a gorgeous creamyness and silkyness to your sauce. Then add the zest of half your lemon. Season to taste with pepper and give it a good stir.

Roughly chop the crispy prosciutto.
Put the rocket into a bowl and halve your lemon.

Once the pasta is cooked, drain it but reserve a bit more of the pasta water. Add the pasta to the mushroom pan and give everything a really good toss.
Add a little of your reserved pasta water and the chopped crisy prosciutto. The sauce should be nice and creamy, add a little more pasta water if it needs it. Toss again and divide onto warmed plates.

Squeeze one half of the lemon over the rocket and dress quickly with your fingertips.
Divide the rocket on top of the pasta and grate over some parmesan and finish with a drizzle of good quality extra virgin olive oil. The rocket will wilt a little because of the heat from the pasta, something that I really like, but feel free to serve it on the side if you prefer.

Eat straight away and hopefully you'll enjoy it as much as me!

All I want for Christmas . . . . . .

Hi Guys,

This week I started thinking about Christmas. The TV adverts have started, the lights are going up in the high streets and my family have been putting their Christmas lists up on the fridge at my parents house.
I haven't started putting the food ideas together yet, but it did get me thinking about any new kitchen kit that I wanted to ask Santa for.

Having a well equipped kitchen can make a big difference to the food you are cooking. Blunt knives wont chop or slice things properly, cheap pans don't hold heat in the same way that good quality heavy bottom ones do, and a food processor that can't cope with what you ask it to do, or just snaps when you try and take the lid off it (ask Esther . . . . I'm not saying anything!) is pretty useless. To be honest, these 3 areas are the ones that in my opinion people should be spending decent money on, and will prove to be a lasting investment at the same time. There isn't really much to gain by spending a fortune on a mixing bowl for example, as long as you have some good sized ones, they will do the same job no matter how cheap they are. If they break? Who cares, they were cheap anyway.

With this in mind I thought I would share with you a few things that I have and use in my kitchen all the time, and if you don't have them already, you might even consider putting them on your Christmas list. For my money, everyone can and should be cooking at home more, it's cheaper, healthier and is good for the soul, and a nice new shiny piece of kitchen kit might be a push in that direction, you never know!

I've mentioned them already, so a great place to start is knives.
Great knives will last you a lifetime if you look after them properly, and will make your cooking life a complete pleasure. You really only need 3 or 4 knives, so stay away from the huge sets with 10 or 12 knives in, as I promise you that you'll never use them all. The 3 that you will use are pictured below. The chef's knife, the small paring knife and the bread knife. 95% of the time I use my chef's knife and I love it.

So what makes a good knife? Well you want a decent weight, with the balance in the right place, the handle should feel good and comfortable in your hand, and the blade should be solid and not bend.  To keep them sharp you'll want a decent sharpener that you use regularly to maintain that sharpness. Blunt knives wont do you any favours.

The revelation of the past 12 months for me was my garlic crusher, and now I don't know how i survived without it. Peeling garlic is one of those jobs that I don't enjoy so much, especially if I am doing a lot of it. All I do now is place the unpeeled cloves in the crusher and squeeze out all of the lovely garlic - brilliant! It saves so much time and also gives you an intense garlicky paste, similar to grating it, which gives a tiny bit of extra spark in your food that chopping doesn't always have.

Speaking of grating, every home needs 2 quality graters. A good box grater and a small microplane one too. They need to be sharp or they are pretty pointless - I always take my small grater with me when I cook at my parents house. I tried zesting a lemon with theirs last week . . . . . . . . . . didn't happen!

A brilliant thing to have in your kitchen arsenal is a variety of boards and plates to serve things on. Good presentation wins you half the battle, and there are lots of "sets" of food things that are around at this time of year that come either on a wooden board, or in a basket that you can use years after you've eaten the cheese or jams or whatever else it came with. It makes a difference, I promise.

I use my pestle and mortar all the time. I make dressings, rubs and curry pastes amongst other things in it and it is fantastic. Food tastes better when you put love and attention into making it, and that is what the pestle and mortar is all about for me. I love bashing up herbs and spices, mixing in oils and other ingredients as the smell you get is incredible.

So what do I want for Christmas? The same thing I've wanted for the last few years, a Magimix food processor in silver. I tried to make a meringue in our old Kenwood processor a couple of weeks ago and it couldn't cope with mixing the egg whites and the sugar. In fact it was jumping around all over our kitchen surface and turning itself off, as the force of the vibrations were loosening the lid!
The meringue turned out lovely in the end, but lets just say that the whisking attachment for the processor ended up in the bin . . . . . . . . . which was the best way round for that story to end.

Happy shopping!

All images in this blog belong to me and cannot be used without my permission.

Esther and Paul do Venice

Hi Everyone,

This week, the post is all about the amazing honeymoon that Esther and I had a few weeks ago.

Venice gets a bit of bad press in terms of it's food, but I'm here to tell you that if you stay away from the tourist hotspots and follow your nose to where the locals go, then you'll be eating some of the most incredible food in the world . . . . . we did!

I love Italian food, I love the simplicity of it. Using a few beautiful ingredients and getting the best out of them is what cooking is all about for me.

Venice itself is a magical fairytale of a place. The endless canals with their bridges, leading to little squares with tiny residential pathways or small allyways make it seem more like a film set than a city.
The touristy places are full of bars and restaurants that charge you a fortune to sit down at, and this is where Venice gets it's stigma. Everything in these places is overpriced. You are paying to be where you are, not for what you are being served. The problem is that to find the best places to eat, you need to be a bit brave. You need to move away from the main tourist strip and go where the locals go. It's not being brave really, as by doing so you are experiencing more of the real aspects of the city. Lets call it being that little bit more like Indiana Jones - exploring a little bit further to find the treasure.
Esther and I were never going to eat or drink in one of the tourist places as it's just not who we are. We went to Naples a few years ago and were blown away by the food we had. Most of which came from street vendors on the sides of the roads. The food was fast, the ingredients were high quality, it was all fresh and it was insanely delicious.

Venice, when you dig a little deeper, is incredible, and we found some amazing places.
I could start telling you about every meal, what we did every day and stuff like that, but I think that'll make this a diary rather than a food blog, so instead I'll keep it to a few things that were truly amazing.

The Rialto Market is a fabulous place to visit. We were up early one morning and headed down to see what they had going on and were both completely awestruck. I have never seen so much beautiful fresh fish. It was endless. The fresh fruit and vegetables were incredible too. Lots of which are grown on 2 dedicated islands in the lagoon. We bought some fruit, but I was gutted not to be able to buy any fish.

On our first day we walked over the Rialto Bridge after coming off the little ferry and found ourselves in the hustle and bustle of market stalls and street food vendors. We picked up a plastic cup full of fresh fruit because they looked amazing and were not disappointed. It was delicious.

The Trattoria al la Madonna is in a backstreet pretty close to the touristy places around the Rialto Bridge. It has a really vibrant atmosphere and beautiful food. Esther had black squid with white polenta which was incredible and I went for the Venetian classic spaghetti vongole which was fantastic. Squid ink has a fabulous depth of flavour and is something not to be missed, especially in Venice.

Il Sigillo is a small cafe with retro-diner style seating. We loved this place! We stopped there for breakfast one morning and had some beautiful speck rolls with rocket, oregano and some delicious olive oil. The coffee was awesome too. We had our final meal of the trip here too, which is pictured below. A beautiful fried pizza base topped with delicious vegetables, rocket and cured meat.

We took a boat trip to the islands of the lagoon, not in search of Venetian glass or lace (which is what the islands are most famous for), but in search of the best risotto in the world.

Signor Ruggero is the top man when it comes to risotto. His restaurant is called Trattoria al Gatto Nero and is located on the island of Burrano (the one that makes the lace - in case you were interested).

I can't even tell you how excited I was to get there and order the risotto burrano. The risotto is flavoured with these little fish that are caught in the lagoon, and it was truly amazing. I tend to get a little over excited at times when it comes to food, and how good it was, but the risotto and also the tiramisu that I had as my dessert were out of this world.

Esther followed her risotto with some beautiful cheese. The real genius with this was the pot of sweet honey served in the middle of it. The next time you do a cheese platter, get yourself a small pot of nice honey and drizzle it over the cheese just before you pop it in your mouth. It is totally gorgeous.

The last place to tell you about is a small cantina called Gia Schiavi. It was full of bottles of wine on one side, and had a counter on the other side filled with lots of differently topped crostini and antipasti. Each crostini was priced at 1 euro each and to be honest, we could have spent a fortune in there. We settled on 6 and took them outside to share next to the canal with a couple of beers. They tasted as good as they look, and as you can see from the picture below, they look pretty tasty! The one at the front, with the pear and gorgonzola was my favourite.

Venice was the perfect honeymoon destination for us, we had amazing weather, were in an incredible and magical city and ate some of the most beautiful food we have ever tasted. What a brilliant way to start our married life.

Ciao!

all food images belong to me and cannot be copied or reproduced