More of the pasta & semi carbonara with Basterma

The beauty about pasta is it comes in so many shapes and sizes and matching them with different sauces, toppings and fillings makes it a dish where the possibilities are endless!

It does freak me out though how people can actually ruin such a simple and amazing ingredient!

My rules for non ruined pasta are easy:

• Boil in lots of salted water! Duh!
• Don’t rinse it under the tap! (Unless your going to leave it for hours! Which you shouldn’t anyway!)
• If for some reason you will cook the pasta and leave it a while, then cook it a little less, then after you strain it, rinse it quickly in cold water to stop carry-over cooking. Reserve all the cooking liquid. When you are ready to serve, bring the reserved cooking water to the boil, and add your pasta back in. It shouldn’t stay in the boiling water for more than a minute or two since you’re just reheating it.
• Add your pasta to your sauce while it’s hot immediately after you strain it! (If you’re making a lasagne give it a min to cool but keep it covered so it doesn’t dry out)
• Always always keep some of the cooking water! It’s starchy and is great to use to adjust the thickness of your sauce & helps the sauce cling better to your pasta.
• Oh and of course never over cook it! Time it! Usually it cooks aldente between 5 to 10 min based on the type.

So now we’ve covered the basics, here’s one of my fav pasta dishes.

I call it semi carbonara since it has a little cream and no bacon. And beef bacon, at least what we have here, is more akin to shoe leather than bacon!

My substitute of choice is basterma 🙂 A middle eastern (armenian???) preserved lean meat, it’s salted then covered in a beautiful spice paste and hung to dry.

The paste hardens into a rind while the meat stays beautifully tender.

Just remove the rind before using it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Adds good flavor, usually sliced wafer thin and can be crisped up if you want to beautifully.

Hope you enjoy!

Fettuccine Semi Carbonara with Basterma

Cheers!

The wedding…Anthony Bourdain & Spicy “Bisque” Fettuccine

My lovely friend Yomna just had her wedding a few weeks ago! It was amazing and she was a gorgeous bride! Thing is, hubby & I had to leave early and I was starving, so he took me to a lovely Italian restaurant for dinner.

What I always order there is their beautiful pasta rose sauce with shrimp. It’s actually not on the menu, but when you ask nicely they will make you anything you want and it’s always delicious! Not just cause of the perfectly cooked shrimp but because of the sauce! It’s not just any old sauce, it’s mellow, creamy and not too tomatoey and most importantly tastes of shrimp!

Now how could I replicate that sauce at home? Get all that shrimp flavour in the sauce? Not from the shrimp itself unfortunately 😦 It cooks real quick and I don’t want heads and shells in my pasta dish either!

Then it hit me! The answer is Bisque! Or at least a close approximation of it!

Anthony Bourdain, whom I love and adore! I adore everything about him including his tongue in cheek approach to everything!
I have his Les Halles cookbook and it’s amazing! True, he assumes everyone trying to cook is a moron but who cares! His recipes are meticulous and fully detailed so you can’t go wrong!

He has an amazing lobster bisque recipe. Extremely time consuming and extremely delicious.

Also back when I was a restaurant owner our chef used to make an amazing crab and shrimp bisque too (lobsters are quite pricey here!).
He’d use it as a base for any dish requiring a seafood sauce and it made quite the difference!

So I’ve adapted (and cheated 🙂 ) what I’ve learned from both into making a shrimp “bisque”-style sauce for my shrimp fettuccine dish. And with a few herbs and spices added to jazz things up!

The result is a pasta sauce full of shrimp flavour thanks to the shrimp heads! With less hassle as I skip the blending step since I’m not making an actual bisque!
The other thing I do is I cook the pasta al dente and take it off the boil a bit early and dunk it into the sauce to continue cooking and absorbing more of that wonderful shrimp flavour!

The shrimp itself is marinated in olive oil, chilli and thyme and then roasted quickly in the oven with cherry tomatoes, garlic and more thyme.

I use milk instead of cream to make it lighter and thicken with cornstarch instead and it still tastes creamy without the heaviness that the cup of cream would add. But hey if you want the richer version use cream instead of the milk 🙂

I love it’s taste and I hope you will too!

Spicy “bisque” fettuccine with roasted shrimp, garlic & thyme

Cheers!