Penne with chilli, anchovy and roasted romanesco cauliflower

Why hello there dinner.

So, when I found out we were getting one of these crazy beautiful vegetables in our weekly veg box, I wanted to use it in a dish in which it could take centre stage. This pasta is what I came up with.

I'm ready for my close-up...

It may not look anything particularly special, but this pasta dish sure tastes like it. Even though the pasta tubes look plain, in reality they are coated in spicy, garlicky anchovy flavour. I decided on roasting the romanesco as I recently discovered the magical transformation that takes place when you roast normal cauliflower - if you think cauliflower is a bit bland, you should really try it roasted - and using romaneco worked just as well. Don't be concerned by the gnarly burnt looking bits when you take the romanesco out the oven - these bits taste like AWESOME.

This could possibly be my new favourite pasta. Big words, people.

Penne with  chilli, anchovy and roasted romanesco cauliflower


Serves 2


Normal olive oil
Extra virgin olive oil
5 garlic cloves
3 anchovy fillets + the oil from the tin
1 tsp dried chilli flakes
1 small romanesco cauliflower
1 tbsp capers
Black pepper
Penne, to serve


Preheat your oven to 180 degrees C. Break up the romanesco into florets and mix in a roasting tin with the normal oil and the chilli. Place in the oven and roast for about 20 mins or until tender. 


Add the oil from the anchovies to a saucepan and fry the garlic and the anchovies until the fish has dissolved into the oil. Take off the heat, add a little extra virgin olive oil for flavour, the capers and plenty of ground black pepper. Mix the roasted romanesco into the oil mixture.


Mix everything with some cooked penne (or any other pasta you desire) and stuff your face.

Fuerteventura

Can I go back here please?

So, the Bear and I had a lovely little last-minute holiday in Fuerteventura. It was pretty awesome -sunny weather, beautiful scenery, fun people and some tasty food – what’s not to like? We stayed in a surfers’ hostel in Correjo, which, despite the fact that we weren’t doing any surfing (or windsurfing…or kitesurfing…or *insert another type of surfing word here*-surfing) turned out to be a really good decision. The accommodation was cheap but good – we had a roof terrace which was great, and having access to a kitchen was also useful for keeping costs down – and we met some really cool people to spend our week with.

I would describe Canarian cooking as similar to the cuisine of the Spanish mainland, with a large dollop of Moorish influence. The terrain is pretty desert-like so the main livestock of the islands are goats, so lots of goat meat and wonderful goats milk cheeses. I am, as it happens, a bit obsessed with goat cheese, so this made me very happy. There's also an abundance of gorgeous seafood to be had.

Traditional dishes include the ubiquitous papas arrugadas con mojo which are little wrinkled potatoes crusted in salt, which you then dip into the mojo sauce. You usually get two types of mojo sauce – a red one which is slightly spicy, and a green one with herbs. Both are flavoured with cumin seeds and are really addictive.

Bottles of  green and red mojo sauce 

Papas arrugadas - picture from a little book I picked up during the holiday called "Canarian Cuisine" by Carlos Gamonal

Another traditional dish is escaldón de gofio, or ‘gofio stew.’ Gofio is a type of grain flour which is used either as a thickener for stews, as here, or to coat foods such as cheese. We tried escaldón de gofio at a little restaurant by the seafront in Correlejo and enjoyed it – despite some some serious scepticism from our waiter  (”Errr…you sure you want this? It is quite strong…” “Yes, we’re sure, we like to try the local dishes…why, don’t you like it?” “Sure, I like it! But I am traditional Canarian man! You are…not.”). The dish is essentially meat stock thickened with gofio flour. The best way I can think to describe it is it’s kind of like a meat-flavoured mashed potato. It’s very nice though, in a comfort-food kind of way.

Another pic from "Canarian Cuisine"

The local cheese is called queso majorero and you can find variations of this all over the island. It is a tasty goats cheese which is sold at different stages of maturity, from very fresh, which is comparable to mozzarella, to very aged, which is like an aged cheddar. Sometimes the cheese comes coated in gofio flour or paprika. Our lunch pretty much every day consisted of queso majorero, tomato and olive oil in a little baguette. We didn’t tire of it, the cheese and tomatoes being so outstanding.

Page on queso majorero from "The world encyclopedia  of cheese" by Juliet Harbutt. It's ok to admit that I own an encyclopedia of cheese, right?

As you might expect, being an island, Fuerteventura is awesome for fish and seafood. The local Hiperdino – a supermarket chain with an amazingly cute dinosaur on the logo – had a great range, and we made good use of this cooking up some juicy prawns one night, and a squid pasta another. Neither myself or the Bear had prepared cephalopod before, but we found a great how-to video online which made the whole thing really easy.

Mmm...it's squidalicious

If you get a chance to, I would also highly recommend sampling the local tipple, ronmiel - a.k.a honey rum. It tastes exactly like you would imagine. Yum.

Sweet, sweet honey rum

So that’s it, my round up of Fuerteventura and it’s food. Here’s the recipe for the squid pasta we made, it’s pretty simple, but with really fresh seafood I think that’s normally the best way…

Squid pasta

Serves 2

2 squid

4 cloves of garlic

2 large-ish tomatoes

2 tbsp thick cream

A large handful of fresh parsley

Olive oil

Salt and pepper

Linguine, to serve

First prepare your squid following this video - http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/videos/1043/preparing-squid

Finely chop your garlic, tomatoes, and parsley.

Put your olive oil in a pan and add the salt. Turn the heat up high and fry the garlic and squid for about a minute. Add the tomatoes and cook for a further 20 seconds or so. Turn off the heat, add the cream, parsely and black pepper.

Serve with linguine. Truly delicious.

Lamb shank ragú with tagliatelle



Lamby goodness



So, the photo I took of this really doesn’t do it justice. Honestly, this could be a contender for my favourite comfort food meal. Ok, so it’s not the healthiest bowl of pasta in the world, but it does include some vegetation, and if you skim off some of the lamb fat, I don’t think it’s that bad. This is a good one to make if, like me, you loooove Bolognese, but fancy switching it up a bit.

Lamb shank ragú with tagliatelle

Serves 8 (this freezes really well too, so I would encourage you to make this amount, even if you’re only making dinner for yourself.)

4 lamb shanks

1 large onion

2 sticks of celery

1 large carrot

2/3 pack of chestnut mushrooms

About half a bulb of garlic

1 tbsp dried rosemary

½ bottle red wine

Chicken/lamb/vegetable stock (I used chicken)

2 tins of chopped tomatoes

Olive oil

S+P

Tagliatelle, to serve.

Add some olive oil to a large pan and brown the lamb shanks. Once they are seared on all sides remove from the pan. Dice the onion, celery, carrot and garlic very fine and add to the pan with the dried rosemary and some seasoning.  Sweat the mixture on a low heat for 15 minutes.

Add the lamb shanks, red wine, tinned tomatoes and stock and simmer for a couple of hours, until the lamb is falling off the bone.

Remove the shanks from the sauce and shred the meat off the bones. Chop up your mushrooms. Add the shredded meat back into the sauce along with the sliced mushrooms. Cook for a further 20 minutes.

Skim as much fat as you can from the top of the sauce. Serve with tagliatelle and  lots of parmesan cheese.