Pasta with aubergine, basil, chilli and pine nuts

Pasta is funny stuff. On the one hand, it's been the staple of student diets, in one form or another, for years. Often just served with grated cheese as it's cheap, filling and quick. At the other extreme, it's the lynchpin of the cuisine of an entire country where it can be covered in all sorts of over-priced shit, like truffles or caviar for fuck's sake. Yet another example of the gentrification of what has been a peasant food for centuries, a subject I've already ranted about.

Let's face it, pasta is usually nothing more than wheat and water, pressed into some fancy shapes. Obviously this belies the long culinary history of pasta. all the way from Italy. There are estimated to be over 350 varieties of pasta, many of which named after a dizzying array of things. Body parts seem a common theme with ears (orecchiette), tongues (linguine), moustaches (mostaccioli, another name for penne) all having pasta shapes named after them. Invertebrates get a bit of a look in too, with snails (lumache), squid (calamarata), worms (vermicelli) and butterflies (farfalle) all having a starring role. Then there is the really odd like bibs (bavette), cooking pots (lasagne) and thimbles (ditalini). Sadly there aren't any obviously rude official regional pasta varieties, as would fit the nature of this blog, though, as I pointed out previously, the word penne is just one "n" too many away from meaning penis. Then, I consulted everybody's friend Google and found that there is actually a dick-shaped pasta variety.

Al dente

 Picture from http://brokenoakranch.blogspot.co.uk/2009/08/pornographic-pasta.html

Anyway, moving back to the recipe in hand, when considering vegetarian dishes, pasta is a perfect base and the Italian love of fresh vegetables make for some delicious possibilities. This concoction is no exception and really is a cracking little recipe. Aubergines, garlic, chilli, basil and a few crunchy pine nuts mean it's stupidly simple and quick to put together. 

TIMING
Preparation: 5 minutes
Cooking: 30 minutes

INGREDIENTS
4 tbsp olive oil plus additional for pouring on
2 tbsp pine nuts
4 cloves of garlic, crushed
1 large aubergine (around 300g in size), chopped into 2cm dice
2 tbsp tomato puree
1 tsp dried chilli flakes
Salt and black pepper to taste
Handful of fresh basil leaves
150-200g dried pasta (penne or fusilli work)

RECIPE
Heat the oil in a large pan and throw in the pine nuts

Fry them for a couple of minutes, until they are golden brown before removing them with a slotted spoon

Add the garlic to the hot oil and fry for 2 minutes before adding the aubergine.

Fry for another 10-15 minutes until the aubergine pieces start to colour

Add the tomato puree, black pepper and salt to taste and continue to cook for another 10-15 minutes, adding the odd tablespoon of water if it gets too dry

Meanwhile, cook the pasta and drain.

Turn the pasta into the pan with the cooked aubergine, mix, and add the pine nuts.

Finally, tear the basil leaves and add to the pasta and aubergines and stir, adding additional olive oil to give the dish a glossy look.

Serve up with some nice crusty bread.

NOTES
Probably because my pedigree is more factory-made by Clarks in northern England than hand-made in Milan, I don't have much time for the whole idea that a certain shape of pasta must be served with a certain type of sauce. In this instance, the dried penne and fusilli I used (there was half a portion of fusilli left so had to add some penne from a new packet) held onto the sauce well. I've also served this with fresh tagliatelli and it works just as good.

The basil and pine nuts really make this dish. Dried basil is not a substitute for fresh leaves as the taste is very different. Pine nuts could possibly be swapped for other nuts, perhaps peanuts or cashews, but the dish will be missing the subtle coniferous fragrance that they impart.

One rare problem with pine nuts is pine mouth syndrome. This can happen after eating some pine nuts when, as I found out one time, you end up with a bitter taste in your mouth for a few days after eating the kernel. It does fade, but you don't enjoy your dinners for a few days as a result.

Contrary to urban myth, pasta was not brought to Italy by Marco Polo coming back from China, but by Arabs from North Africa. Is nothing sacred? Next thing you know they'll be claiming Arabs gave the world mathematics like algebra or made early advances in astronomy. Oh, wait, they did.

Bruschetta

It's a Sweary Brucie-Bonus!
Fucking nice to see you, to see you, fucking nice!

Bruce Forsyth is a showbiz legend in the UK. He's also older than God's dad. Despite his advanced years, until a couple of years back he was still presenting Strictly Come Dancing on the BBC. He's most famous for his shit jokes and godawful catchphrases involving audience participation, though nowadays you can't help thinking that he uses the audience to help remember what he's supposed to be saying. The reason I mention him is so he cannot be confused with the subject of this blog entry, the wonderful Italian starter bruschetta.

First thing's first, this is how it's pronounced:

Bruschetta (or this version, at any rate) is basically an open tomato sandwich on toasted bread. This description really doesn't do justice to the dish, and it's a bit like describing a blowjob as a moist wank. The combination of the toasted bread, fresh tomatoes, olive oil garlic and fresh basil is fantastic.

INGREDIENTS
1 loaf of fresh bread (French baguette or ciabatta)
1 large clove of garlic
Good olive oil (extra virgin)
100g ripe tomatoes, roughly chopped
Small handful of fresh basil leaves
Black pepper

RECIPE
Slice the bread diagonally to give plenty of area to put the rest of the ingredients on and toast the bread on both sides.

Rub the clove of garlic on the toasted bread then crush what's left.

Gently fry the crushed garlic in some olive oil for a couple of minutes and set aside

Pile the chopped tomatoes on the bread

Liberally drizzle olive oil on the bread and tomatoes

Tear the basil leaves roughly and scatter them on top of the bruschetta

Pour the fried garlic and oil over then grind plenty of black pepper and serve it up.

This amount of tomatoes is enough to make four decent-sized slices which is a good starter for two or something smaller for four. It makes a great starter with something like my recently posted ham and mushroom pasta dish

NOTES
This recipe lives or dies on the quality of its ingredients. It needs fresh bread; fresh, ripe tomatoes; a decent quality, fruity olive oil and fresh basil.

You can toast the bread in a toaster. On the other hand, you can make it look good by the art of food wankerie and doing it in a hot, dry griddle pan. Being of the epicurean onanistic persuasion, I used the griddle pan method

As I said above, the tomatoes need to be nice and ripe and quite soft. To be honest, this recipe is best made in the summer when tomatoes have the most flavour. If it's out of season, at least look for the reddest and most fragrant tomatoes you can get.

Pasta with ham and mushrooms

Time for a sweary confession. It's hopefully obvious from this blog that I really love food and, more, that I'm fairly discerning about what I eat. I believe that great meals need good quality ingredients. All this is true, but I absolutely fucking adore pork scratchings. Pig rind, pork crackling, pork crunch, call it what you will, but in my opinion scratchings are the food of the fucking gods. Quite honestly, to me, scratchings are the ambrosia (no, not the rice pudding, you knob) to the nectar (no, not the loyalty scheme, you knob) that is beer. I would live on them if I could, though you would definitely be well advised to stand upwind of me if I did as they do not make a pleasantly aromatic bedfellow with my gut microflora.

I'm so much of a scratchings nerd it's often the second thing I look for in a new pub, after what beer they do. The most exotic of these was when I was getting pissed on San Miguel (Filippino version, not the Spanish version. They are supposed to be the same but they taste very different) it is in a small beach bar in Manila (in a street, not on a beach). They had vendors coming round to sell all sorts of weird things including knock-off watches, knock-off viagra (at least I assume it was knock-off) and even live snakes. Then a guy appeared who was selling actual pork scratchings which were fantastic. Of course, scratchings are also quite possibly the very worst thing you can actually eat: thick with fat, caked in salt and can shatter your teeth if you get bad batch. And don't even get me started on the smell that literally farts from the bag when you open it. Negative points aside, the point of all this is that, with all due respect to my vegetarian, Muslim and Jewish friends, surely pigs are meant to be eaten if even their packaging tastes so fantastic.

Filipino pork scratchings!

Obviously, there is far more to (from?) the pig than scratchings. There is a phrase from Spain saying they use "everything but the squeal" from the pig, (which is also the title of a book by a British expat living in Galicia), in that pretty much the entire animal is used in some way. If you think about it, there are a multitude of things derived from the original pig. Scratchings I've already mentioned, then there's bacon, sausages of various types, uncured pork meat in various forms, a whole anatomy of offal and even the blood in the form of blackpudding. There are less "meaty" products like lard and suet, then there are other uses for pigskin as leather and gelatine. Let's also not forget a wealth of medical uses: porcine insulin is used in treating diabetics and pig skin can be used to make dressings to treat burns patients. Pig products even find their way into cosmetics. 

I couldn't do a comedy/cookery blog mentioning Spam and not put this, could I?

One of the greatest product of the pig is ham. Like any food, ham can vary from the sublime, like Jamon Iberico from Spain, to the revolting, like tinned spiced ham otherwise known as Spam (so bad they named nuisance e-mail after it). In fairness, Spam is not a good representation of actual ham since it is at least partially mechanically recovered meat and not entirely pig in origin. Generally, real ham tastes good however much you pay for it.This is especially true if you intend to use it in a recipe like this rather than stick it in a sandwich. True, cheaper versions are pumped full of water so you're getting less meat per penny, but the flavour should still be there which, for the purposes of this recipe, is all you need.

This is yet another cheap, quick and easy meal. These factors are all well and good, and they form a bit of a theme in many of my blog entries. The most important thing, however is that this dish really tastes fucking fantastic which is a more prominent theme I hope runs through every single one of my recipes.

INGREDIENTS
1 tbsp olive oil
1/2 red onion, finely chopped
3 cloves of garlic, crushed
100g chestnut mushrooms roughly chopped
150g cooked ham, roughly chopped (smoked if you prefer)
pinch of fennel seeds
pinch of mixed herbs
dash of lemon juice
1/2 a vegetable stock cube
100ml red wine
100ml pasata
Black pepper

All ready to cook
From 9 o'clock: ham, mushrooms, garlic, red onion

RECIPE
Heat the oil in a good heavy pan and add the onion and garlic.
Slowly cook the onion for 5-10 minutes then throw in the mushrooms.

Keep sauteing until they are cooked and add the ham to warm through.

Add the fennel seeds, herbs and lemon juice before crumbling in the half stock cube.

Pour in the wine and pasata and stir well, adding freshly ground black pepper. Leave to simmer for 5-10 minutes.

Serve on pasta. Tagliatelle works quite well

Ready to eat

NOTES
You can use smoked or regular ham. The tastes are different but both make a great dish.

For the version I took photos of for this recipe I used a cheap off-cuts pack of smoked ham from my local super market. It's not going in a sandwich and you're chopping it up so the original form doesn't matter too much and this was also quite cheap.You could use panchetta if you were feeling particularly foodie wankerish but it is a little over-powering in this dish.

I'm glossing over the recent WHO report naming  processed meat products such as ham as carcinogenic.

Yet again I need to point out that, while my regular blog guest star, Rick Stein, may mention being somewhere exotic like the Philippines in his painfully meandering stories, he probably wouldn't be talking about getting rat-arsed on cheap local beer and being offered drugs to give you a prolonged stiffy, or indeed pork scratchings. Sweary Chef wins again.

Mince wonder part 3: Bolognaise

It was only a matter of time before I got round to posting my version of this old kitchen standard and it's yet another addition to my array of mince wonders following chilli con carne and shepherds' pie. Mince doesn't cost a lot and can also be replaced by veggie mince if necessary, making it flesh-dodger friendly, so this dish is really versatile, tasty and cheap. It's the ultimate student/laddish meal but nice enough for a more sedate dinner with polite company.

It's a cliché to refer to the 1970s as the decade that style forgot, but this isn't really fair. Sure, the fashion was largely pretty ludicrous, but this was also the decade that gave us punk and decimalisation. It's also the time when we Brits started to look to our new European chums for food and style tips. These aspirations to European cool may have left a lot to be desired by today's standards, but then again, you do need to learn to shit in a potty before you can use the toilet.

70s fashion
This much polyester in one location is now banned due to the fire risk

In the 1970s spaghetti bolognaise was the absolute fucking zenith of continental sophistication. In fact this dish is so 70s you could put a droopy moustache on it and call it Peter Wyngarde. I know it's easy to scoff with the benefit of hindsight, but its competition in terms of continental sophistication at the time included crème caramel in plastic pots; Colman's Beef Bourgignon ready-made sauce mix in a sachet; and Blue fucking Nun Liebfraumilch German white wine, so it won hands down on being something that tasted nice.

Label from a Blue Nun bottle
and a video giving correct response to being offered this awful excuse for wine

Anything from mainland Europe was considered stylish. Even British cars of the time had an aura of continental mystique about them with names like Allegro, Cortina and Capri. This was, of course, long before our era of Easyjet and Ryanair flights, the Channel Tunnel and the EU. This was an age when these places across the Channel in Europe were exotic and sophisticated. They were separated from us by water, they were "other". These countries were so exotic you needed visas to enter them, so sophisticated that you could get ameobic dysentery from merely looking at a glass of the local tap water (or so travel advice of the time would lead you to believe).

Europe had an edge, it seemed a dangerous place. There was often a pervading mistrust of Germany from those who had lived through WWII. France ate funny-shaped bread, molluscs and amphibians. Spain was just recovering from being under a Fascist dictatorship and was on the verge of a military coup in order to return it to one at any time (yes, this really almost happened).

Nowadays things are different. Forty years on and we find that we Brits are more worldly wise. Foreign travel is nothing we think twice about. We pay the price of a pint of Belgian lager (brewed under licence in Wales) allowing us to be herded onto a 737 to Barcelona or Bratislava for a weekend. We get there and immediately find an Irish pub to get shit-faced on Guinness while watching the Man U game before getting a Big Mac on the way back to our hotel to crash out before a full English in the morning to dissolve the hangover. Like I said, exotic and oh-so-fucking worldly.

As I've alluded to in other blog entries, this was my very first taste of Italian food. As I've also alluded to, I was raised in a house that was hardly an outpost of culinary exploration. Bolognaise in my family went through various incarnations as I grew up though, in fairness, many of them were actually quite tasty if not authentically Bolognaise. For example, baked beans don't really grow on trees in the fair city of Bologna, but did find their way into some of my parents' incarnations of this ragout but made for a reasonably palatable dinner. My version is a bit more authentic and certainly doesn't have baked fucking beans in it.

INGREDIENTS
500g beef mince (or vegetarian mince if you are so inclined)
2 tbsp olive oil
1 large onion, finely chopped
1 stick celery, finey chopped
1medium carrot, finely chopped
4 large cloves of garlic, crushed
250g mushrooms, coarsely chopped
2 tins of tomatoes (or replace 1 tin with a 500g carton of pasata)
2 table spoons of tomato puree
1 tsp mixed, dried herbs
1 bay leaf
1 tsp paprika
Freshly ground black pepper to taste
1 beef stock cube
150ml red wine
2 tsp balsamic vinegar
2 tsp Worcester sauce
Dash of Tabasco sauce (optional)
2 tsp dark soy sauce

RECIPE

The vegetables
Carrot, celery, garlic, onion and mushrooms.
Note how finely chopped they are, apart from the mushrooms

In a heavy saucepan dry-fry the mince to brown it for about 5 minutes (essentially until it's cooked), making sure it's well broken up with no lumps, and pour it into a sieve to get rid of the excess fat.

To the empty pan add the olive oil and heat on medium before adding the onion and garlic to fry for 5 minutes.

Throw in the celery and carrot and gently cook for 10 more minutes, ong enough to soften, then add the mushrooms for another 5 minutes until they look cooked.

Return the cooked mince to the pan and add the tomatoes, breaking them up (or use chopped tinned tomatoes), before stirring well and adding the herbs, bay leaf, paprika, black pepper and mix well.

Crumble the stock cube in and squirt in the tomato puree, again stirring well.

Pour in the wine, balsamic vinegar, Worcester sauce and (if you're using it) Tabasco.

Stir well, bring to the boil then turn down the heat to simmer with the lid on for at least an hour, ideally two or more.

Keep checking intermittently and stirring. Leave the lid off for a while if the sauce is too liquid.

It's a pan of pasta sauce
What more do you want?

This recipe makes plenty for four adults.
Serve with pasta (well, duh!) and bread

NOTES
As a pasta sauce this needs to be nice and smooth, so the onions, carrot and celery need to be finely chopped. Also, make sure the mince is nicely broken up when frying it. The mushrooms add a bit of texture so need to be chopped larger. It's actually a good way to hide vegetables if you have a sprog with an aversion to culinary plant matter.

Using pasata instead of a tin of tomatoes makes a more smooth, almost creamy texture. Tinned tomatoes are cheaper though

Tabasco adds a bit of subtle piquancy so don't use too much. It's not supposed to be "spicy". On the other hand, my piquant might leave some chilli-dodgers with steam blowing out of their ears. These things are relative so leave it out if you or your guest(s) are effete.

Pasta for this is traditionally spaghetti, but in the Sweary household we tend to use something that takes less cutlery skill to eat, like penne or fusilli, mainly because Mrs Sweary can't eat spaghetti without looking like an extra from True Blood when she's finished (see picture for an idea of what I mean).

Darling, but you've got a wee bit of sauce round your mouth.
I told you you should have ordered penne for your bolognaise instead of spaghetti

70s fashion pics from https://www.pinterest.com/hippyali/70s-men/ and http://www.paintlouisville.org/70s-fashion-trends.html. Blue Nun label image from https://www.flickr.com/photos/jassy-50/13336957223. Messy eater picture sourced from http://weheartit.com/entry/154371114/in-set/93667449-blood?context_user=loverofsatan666&page=2