Pastaaaaaaah

It's all my parents fault! I believe my love of pasta comes from their fantastic meals as a child and now I'm hooked. From early childhood my Dad has made amazing tuna mornay, yummy spag bol (even if I had to pick out the chunks of tomato), stomach splitting carbonara and my Mum makes an unbeatable and classic lasagne (I know you're thinking that your Mum's lasagne is the best but really, my Mum's better ;-).

Pasta has become a common culinary feature of my life. Pasta cared for me during university, it was affordable, reliable, delicious no matter the sauce, something you could cuddle up to on a cold Canberra evening and it always left my wallet a little spare change for beer. What a friend! Pasta has made a come-back in recent weeks with the acquisition of a brand spanking shiny new pasta machine.

Its first use was a collaborative effort by friends while I worked on the sauce. For those of you who were there and liked the chorizo carbonara click here. For those of you who weren't there, click anyway, two of my favourite things in one meal CHORIZO and CARBONARA. It doesn't it get any better than that. Obviously I used much more of everything for 8 people and I added a shitload (I'm pretty sure that's a standard cooking technical term) of mushrooms fried in the remains of the chorizo oil and garlic, heaps of rosemary until it smells like a garden and since we're on the fatty road to heart disease, I mixed together 3 lightly beaten eggs (for two people one egg would be fine), a few glugs of cream and a handful of parmesan (or similar) in a separate bowl (instead of the yoghurt). Add this after everything else is mixed in to the pasta, warm it up but on low heat as you don't want your eggs to cook like scrambled eggs. Serve immediately. Unfortunately I don't have a picture of this but it was fan-bloody-tastic, if I do say so myself.

Next. I decided to have a crack at making tortellini. I did take a lot of pictures but since J is in South Africa, he took the good camera and I got the crap one which only seems to take blurry pictures or maybe I was drunk at the time (wink, wink, nudge, nudge). Therefore, I've only got the finished product rather than the whole production process. Spinach and ricotta was the order of the day. I didn't measure anything so just combine a couple of spoons of ricotta, a bag of spinach, a few cracks of black pepper and a pinch of ground nutmeg and off you go. Give it a whizz and it should make a creamy green mixture. Click here for a good step by step recipe, right from the making of the dough through to shaping the tortellini. Although I used a different flour to egg ratio. I use the Jamie Oliver method of 1 egg per 100g of flour.

Tadaaaaa! Wonderful home made tortellini. The sauce was simple and delicious, a knob of butter, lots of fresh sage leaves and a clove of garlic, fry gently until the butter is a slightly darker golden colour. There are heaps of burnt butter recipes out there. I do recommend that you love, or very much like cooking as this takes a couple of hours to make, including the dough. Instead of using the excess dough to make more tortellini circles I made tagliatelle instead and froze it for later.

I could go on and on and on about pasta but I'm off to make some sushi instead. Now you know why I've earned and replaced my middle name with 'carbohydrate'.

P.S. If anyone knows where to by Tipo '00' flour in Sweden please tell me!