Cook pasta + olive oil + deli ingredients
If you can boil a pan of water, you can make pasta, and if you can shop at a deli counter you need do nothing more than lubricate the cooked pasta with some good olive oil and tip in the contents of a plastic container to have a delicious dinner on the table in moments.
It’s almost more of an “if you can buy that you can make this†recipe, but here goes – some notes on boiling pasta:
- Bring a large pan of water to the boil. Put a lid on to speed things up, and get the water going way in advance of people coming over if you intend to cook for company – watching a water pot come to the boil can seem to take forever.
- Salt the boiling water. There’s an Italian saying about the water needing to be as salty as the Mediterranean Sea. I think that’s in the region of a scant tablespoon – depending on the size of your pot.
- Tip in the pasta shapes – about 100g per person – though I usually use more …
- Stir to stop them sticking together and let them boil for however long it says on the box, minus 1 minute. Nothing worse than claggy pasta. You’re going for al dente.
- Drain, but not too well – the starch in the pasta water helps bind the sauce together.
- Pour over something in the region of 1 tablespoon of olive oil per person.
- Top with deli ingredients.
– sounds easy, right?
And if you can make that, you can make this;