James went to Oxford to see Mogwai, so I made Nigella's Lone Linguine with White Truffle. It's principally pasta with egg, butter, cream, pepper and truffle oil. Possibly not the healthiest of food, but it takes a few minutes - unless you're faffing about looking for ingredients and watching the iplayer like me - and the creaminess lessens mid-week despair a bit.
I used spaghetti instead of linguine since that's what I have, and I also believe they're the same except spaghetti is more tubular.
I find some pasta different, like I find fusili takes longer to cook than spaghetti, and I know the shells are better for sauce-type things that can settle in the little holes in the shells, and you can stuff the bigger shells. I think that pasta is mostly interchangeable and I use whatever I have.
This is what I believe.
I don't have enough kitchen space to justify having many different pasta types for different sauce types - I only keep two kinds: a long, thin pasta (I currently have spaghetti) and a representative from the chunky pasta family (currently: shells/conchiglie).
Truffle oil sounds fancy but can easily be got. Obviously there are artisan truffle oils just as there is artisan everything else (including spoons) but I used the fresh from the supermarket variety myself.
Urbani truffle oil, from Waitrose (review of bottle: bottle needs better screwcap).
I'm aware of the truffle oil controversy, but this is how I figure it: I'm not harvesting a truffle anytime soon, but I can get a 4.99 bottle of truffle oil to experiment with. With a 4.99 bottle I won't fear disappointment. Somehow I have a little bubbling feeling that truffles are massively over-rated. Possibly because they're rare and French.
My pasta was lovely.
I made a few adjustments: used spaghetti instead of linguine, colourful ground peppercorns instead of white pepper, didn't add Parmesan, but added a little bit of mushroom pate instead, with a bit on the side.
Pate-moi pate. Amazing!
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