Thursday 22 July 2010

Casareccia with Broccoli Arrabiata


If you believe the adverts, Italian mothers prepare their boy's favourite dish for his every visit.

Not so in the post-feminist scrum that is Britain.

I can barely drop my knapsack before mother points me to the kitchen. There, under a bombardment of dubious style tips and flying Kettle chips, I grind out her favourite dinner.

This is it.


Ingredients (serves a big strong boy and his ma)


250g of suitable pasta. We're looking for anything that would work with pesto really: trofie, orrechiette, casaraccia or even linguine.

One head of broccoli

Clove of garlic

Red chilli

Small splash of white wine

Sprinkle of toasted pine nuts

Pecorino


  1. Make sure you've got some toasted pine nuts to hand. Toasting them really does make all the difference. Here's to pine nuts, people.

  2. Chop the florets off the broccoli. This is broccoli a la Dubya.

  3. Get the broccoli florets and the pasta into a boiling pot of water. As with the anelli recipe, this gives you a nice ten minutes to prepare the sauce. It's all you need.

  4. Mash up the garlic with the back of your knife. Chop the chilli nice and fine. Scrape this pungent double act into the oil together. Turn it on low and coax out some flavour.

  5. Give it a couple of minutes, then splosh in some white wine. No more than a giant gobful, preferably measured by eye.

  6. Bring the wine to the boil. Soon the alcohol will have had enough of the wet heat and get out of there, leaving the wine and the oil to get together.

  7. Heat down low. The wine should be on a very slow simmer. Over the next six minutes or so, the wine and the garlicky oil should emulsify into something like a hot dressing.

  8. PASTA'S DONE!

    Drain the pasta and the broccoli. Leave it a little wet though – those starchy green droplets play a crucial role in our sauce. Return it all to the pan. Take a look. Looks crap doesn't it? A load of over-boiled broccoli and some dry pasta.

    Cover that shit up with the pan's lid. Next time you lift it up, you're eyes are gonna spin round your skull, your tongue's gonna come flapping out of your mouth, and you're not gonna believe what you just saw.

  9. OK, find the campest oven gloves in your house and secure the pan lid to the pan. Ready? Now shake the bejeezus out of that pan and everything in it.

    It's not so much about your arms as your core strength here. You should feel your midriff hit new heights of Peter Andre, Mysterious Girl, tightness. Alternatively, you could give yourself a hernia. That's another genetic weakness I've inherited.

    Anyway, shake the pan for about a minute. Less if you feel your guts explode through a hole in your abdominal wall.


  10. Right lift off the pan lid. What do you see? That's right – a glorious emerald slick, coating all your pasta.

    Ok, I may have oversold this sight at Step 8, but I still love it. This is the perfect base for a sauce. The texture, the nutrition, the colour is all there. Now we just need to give it some oomph.

  11. Return to your saucepan of emulsified oomph - wine, oil, chilli and garlic. Pour that delicious sauce all over the broccoli slick. Take about half of the toasted pine nuts and and imagine that they had been spreading rumours about you through the kitchen store cupboards at night:

    "Cereal Killah ain't shit.... Cereal Killah doesn't know what he's doing anymore.... Cereal Killah took four goes to make an alioli..." - stuff like that.

    Crush this little rebellion.with the back of a heavy knife. Make sure this is in full view of of every single ingredient that could have heard what these bitch-ass pine nuts were saying about you. You're making an example of them. Now toss their crushed bodies into the pot.

  12. Stir the pots contents about – we are producing the final sauce here. Take care to mash up and lingering bits of stalk. Imagine President GW Bush was coming round. We all know how he feels about stalks....

  13. Finally, once the sauce has reached something like homogeneity, put it into bowls. Grate some Pecorino on top, and throw a few pine nuts on as a garnish.

  14. Interrupt your mother's favourite midweek soap by calling out the following line from Peter Andre's Mysterious Girl, originally delivered by the great Bubbla Ranks:

"Baby girl, I said tonight it your lucky night - broccoli spicey pasta's rada nice!"

Serve.

Watch mother's face as she tucks into her metrosexual son's cooking:
Pride and shame all at the same time.




3 comments:

  1. bulb of garlic?

    ReplyDelete
  2. No, a clove.

    Unless you're heading scarfless through the heart of Transylvania, the Vampire Hall of Fame, yeah?

    He won't bite beast or man,
    'Cos he's a vegetarian

    Big shout out to my man Count Duckula.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Funny and tasty! Viva il (la!?) metrosexual.

    ReplyDelete