Pasta alla puttanesca

 

This is our standby dish if we’re to tired to cook anything else. That sounds like a put-down, but it’s actually a great dish (particularly considering the minimal time and effort required to cook it). Another advantage is that all the ingredients can sit in your store cupboard for months without deterioration.

Ingredients (for the sauce):

• One small tin of good quality anchovy fillets in olive oil (25g anchovies, 40g including the oil, about 8 anchovies)
• One large clove of garlic
• One bird’s eye chilli (or two if you like things slightly spicier)
• One can of plum tomatoes in tomato juice (400g including the juice)
• A generous tablespoon of capers, washed in cold water
• 70g chopped black olives (that’s a packet roughly, you want the ones in olive oil, not water)

Ingredients (for the pasta)

• 200g of dried spaghetti; or
• 400g of fresh pasta
• Salt

Ingredients (to serve)

• Black pepper
• Freshly grated Parmesan cheese

Serves 2

Fry the anchovies in their own oil in a frying pan (you don’t need to chop them first, or add further olive oil) on a medium high heat. Stir them periodically and they will break up, and eventually form a sort of paste. Meanwhile, chop the garlic and chilli finely. Once the anchovy has formed a paste, add the garlic and stir for a minute. Meanwhile using a knife you don’t care much about (a table knife works well), chop the tomatoes in the can (that’s oddly better than buying chopped plum tomatoes); add these to the pan. Add the capers and chopped olives. Put on the pasta (see below). Wait until the sauce bubbles, then turn the heat down to medium low.

For the pasta, add boiling water and salt to the pasta and boil for 11 minutes (dried spaghetti) or two minutes (fresh pasta). Drain and serve.

For the meal in the photo, we used fresh tagliatelle because we’d made it the previous day and had some left over. To be honest the dish works better with dried spaghetti if you ask me, which is infinitely easier.

Serve with plenty of freshly ground black pepper and freshly grated Parmesan cheese.