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| 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.
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