686. Black Perigord Truffle

Truffles can be extremely expensive, so I was very lucky to be able to get a very small jar from work and save myself a whole lot of money in the process! I wanted to use them in a luxurious dinner to make sure to bring out the best in them, so I cooked some authentic Italian spaghetti and made a sauce with chicken, mushrooms, white wine and cream, then folded in the chopped truffle at the last minute. The truffle flavour is lovely - it is both strong and subtle and adds an earthiness to the dish. I doubt I will be having them again any time soon though!

686 down, 1110 to go

673. Crab Linguine

A little while back, Pie came home from work with a surprise for me. Handing over a carrier bag I found it was filled with 2 huge crabs. I’ve never even cooked with crab from a can before, let alone fresh crab which I have to get out of the shells. I found a tutorial online and got to dismantling them. It took a good while but I ended up with a lot of crab meat (so much so that we ate crab the entire weekend). Friday night’s dinner was this crab linguine. It’s a really simple pasta dish where the crab is just mixed with olive oil, lemon juice, a little chilli and some parsley so that the sweet flavour of the crab is the main star and isn’t overwhelmed. It was delicious and was definitely a great way to eat the crab.

673 down, 1123 to go

636. Spaghetti Aglio e Olio

Spaghetti aglio e olio is one of those classic Italian dishes which I’ve often heard about but never tried before. Spaghetti with nothing but olive oil and garlic just sounded kind of dull to me, and also really heavy if you’re having all that pasta and olive oil with very little else to lighten the dish up and cut through the stodge. I decided to give it a go for my lunch though so I heated up the olive oil with a couple of cloves of sliced garlic and mixed in the spaghetti. I found that my suspicions were at least part right. Surprisingly it wasn’t too heavy, the garlic seemed to be enough to give it a kick and cut through the oil; it was dull though. The first couple of mouthfuls were lovely, the strong garlic flavour really came through, but after that I was just craving for there to be something else. Some other flavour or texture to mix it up a little. I think perhaps this would be nice as a side dish, but I wouldn’t have it as a bowl of pasta on its own again.

636 down, 1160 to go

609. Edam

I bought this cookbook in Greece of traditional Greek recipes, and when I was browsing through it the other week I found a recipe for a mac and cheese pie. Yes. You heard that right. Mac and cheese PIE. And on top of that it also included sausage. Mac and cheese + pastry + sausage. Of course I immediately thought that this sounded like the single best idea I’d ever heard and rushed to the store to buy the ingredients to make it for dinner.

To make a bit of a change from cheddar, I chose edam as the cheese. I thought that with the sausage and pastry, choosing a slightly milder, lighter cheese would probably be advisable. Edam still has enough of a cheesy flavour to make it good for a mac and cheese though.

Basically, to make the pie, you make a homemade cheese sauce and boil the pasta like you normally would for a mac and cheese. At the same time, grill the sausages. Slice them up when you’re done and mix the macaroni, cheese sauce and sausage together. Pile it all into an oven dish, cover the top with storebought puff pastry (get the all-butter stuff if you can find it, it’s so much better) and bake for like 20 minutes. Voila, awesomest dinner ever. As you can see I served mine with some green salad to try and pretend that it was the unhealthiest meal ever. But frankly when something tastes this good, who cares.

609 down, 1187 to go

567. Bolognese Meat Sauce

Spaghetti bolognese is one of the most popular dinners in Britain - I assume because it’s cheap and easy to make for a family meal. I always like to cook mine for a long time though which stops it from being quite such a quick fix on a weeknight. I just find that a long cooking time improves the sauce tenfold as the tomatoes have a chance to get thick and rich and release all their flavour and sweetness. Traditionally it’s made with ground beef but as I don’t like it I usually make mine with ground pork. What vegetables you add also seems to be a bit of a debate as everyone seems to add different ones. Personally I use onion, carrots, celery and mushrooms.

567 down, 1229 to go

511. Quark

I haven’t had a chance to go through my vacation pictures yet, so in the meantime I’ll carry on posting a few older things that I haven’t got around to writing up yet. Quark is one of those foods which I’d heard of before doing the list but never tried because it didn’t sound all that exciting. I’m glad the list has led me to it though because it’s actually really pretty tasty and a nice healthy alternative to using sour cream or mascarpone or something. So far I’ve used it a few times in different pasta dishes - this one was a baked spaghetti which had crumbled sausage, peppers, tomatoes, the quark, and then mozzarella on the top.

511 down, 1285 to go

457. Dolcelatte

Mac and cheese is one of my absolute favourite comfort foods (always homemade). The other day I decided to fancy mine up a bit by scattering the top with little bacon pieces and chunks of dolcelatte. As a mild blue cheese it added a different flavour without being too strong and taking over.

457 down, 1339 to go

454. Fettucine Alfredo

On our last night in Quebec we just wanted a quick meal so we popped into a hotel restaurant near our apartment. We found that they had this awesome way of ordering your pasta. You got a little card and a pencil and you went through and picked which pasta you wanted (spinach fettucine), which sauce you wanted (alfredo), which extras you wanted (chicken, mushrooms, bell peppers and fresh basil), and which cheese you wanted on top (mozzarella). There was so much choice you could go in there every night for a year and never have the exact same dish. My choice was easy though as fettucine alfredo with chicken is one of my absolute favourite pasta dishes, and you don’t really get it much in England.

454 down, 1342 to go

438. Polpettone di Tacchino

What with my Italian being pretty much limited to ice cream flavours and pasta sauces (that was as much language as I picked up in the two weeks I spent in Tuscany 12 years ago), I had to google what these were, and the first thing that came up was the Mario Batali recipe you can find here. I have always loved Mario Batali on Iron Chef so I figured that would be a good place to start. I pretty much used his recipe for the meatballs (except that I used all turkey meat rather than half turkey and half pork), but I decided that rather than a traditional tomato sauce I would pair them with a cream sauce instead. Turkey and cream sauces is such a great combination. Plus, I had some black truffle chitarra from work I wanted to use and I figured cream would pair much better with that than tomato. I was really pleased with the results; the meatballs were so moist, definitely a recipe I would recommend.

438 down, 1358 to go