Monday's pasta and cheese

There's no picture of our Italian dinner,
but here we are in Rome.

Matt, my husband, had been mentioning on and off about recreating a pasta dish we had in Rome last year: cacio e pepe. This translates as cheese and pepper and was on offer in lots of the restaurants around where we were staying. A quick internet search (we made use of the free Wi-Fi®* in our apartment) revealed that it literally consisted of loads of grated cheese and freshly ground black pepper. This was something I wasn't keen on spending my touristical Euros on in a restaurant when we could quite easily rustle it up ourselves – especially as the apartment also came with black pepper. So we bought some spaghetti and the suggested two types of cheese (pecorino and grana padano if memory serves me correctly). There was a lot of cheese, but we like cheese. And we had ourselves a very simple and delicious dinner.

But we are not on holiday and thus such a super cheesy dinner was out of the question when normal diet rules apply. But I had been thinking about macaroni cheese a bit recently. I haven't had macaroni cheese for years. Rather than a pure macaroni cheese (which is probably on the too cheesy end of the spectrum) I decided to incorporate some spinach which wasn't going to keep much longer. And rather than macaroni I actually used whole wheat pasta bows. So it wasn't really going to be much of a macaroni at all.

I started off by making a white sauce in one pan and sweating a chopped red onion in another. The onion was easy – I have a lot of practice. The white sauce on the other hand might be a problem, my success rate is variable. I was feeling kind of optimistic because I had seen a TV cook make one the other day so had a new trick up my sleeve. I started off with a big dollop of butter (maybe I would have more success if I weighed it), melted this and then added about the same volume of plain flour. As I have deduced I cooked this for quite a while to avoid raw flour taste in the sauce – I think it is now called a roux. Once I thought the roux had cooked for long enough I added some milk – here's the new trick: the TV cook had used boiling milk. Now to me the concept of boiling milk is very worrying (visions of extreme mess in the microwave / all over the hob) but I was prepared to heat it up a bit. So I blasted my first cup of milk for 30 seconds on high to make it a bit hot. On adding this to my roux the whole lot thickened immediately. None of the tedious whisking for ages that I'm used to. I did the same with a second and third cup of milk and ended up with what looked like a rather nice white sauce.

But I wasn't after a nice white sauce, I was after cheesy spinach goodness. The cheese went in first – about half a standard size block of strong cheddar (or low(er) fat imitation in this instance), along with some ground nutmeg and black pepper. And then I tipped in my now sweated onion and the spinach. I used the whole bag of spinach which might at first seem a lot (it was 3+ colanders full) but it cooks down to a fraction of this volume. While that cooked a little bit I boiled the pasta (to save on washing up I used the same pan as for the onion).

 

It was all happening surprisingly quickly now. I tipped the cooked pasta into an oven-proof dish and poured over the spinach / cheese sauce and mixed it all up. That would probably have been enough, but for a few extra vitamins I added some cherry tomatoes, for a bit of extra texture I sprinkled over some breadcrumbs, and then just because I grated over a bit of parmesan.

 

It went into the oven at 180ºC and baked for about 15 minutes. The outcome was just as delicious as the cacio e pepe. Maybe not quite as simple, but definitely more nutritious. And it made an excellent reheat Tuesday lunch.

 

*Matt is happy to provide an explanation of why this is a registered trademark.