About time I posted again right? I am still ploughing my way through Jamie's 30 minute meals and have lots of uploading to do, but... as I like doing things out of order, I'm going to skip forward to tonight's dinner.
Tonight, after much debate, we settled on the Rigatoni, which is accompanied with a rocket salad, chicory salad and ciabatta with a Limoncello triffle affair for dessert.
My kitchen began the journey like this:
You are supposed to start by sprinkling the ciabatta with olive oil and thyme and popping in the oven - I missed this step completely, which resulted in a last minute panic to get it in the oven in time. We still had time to cook it though, and I was about to drain the pasta by the time I remembered!
The trifle is the first thing I tackled, which makes sense as it has to go in the fridge so it is ready in time. You squeeze oranges and add some limoncello, place the sponge fingers in and then top with a mascarpone, icing sugar, milk and vanilla extract concoction, You then sprinkle with raspberries and grate some chocolate over.
Chicory is sliced in half and placed on a griddle. I've never had chicory before, so I was curious as to what this would taste like.
In the meantime the pasta is cooking. The sauce is made like a pesto, chopping almonds, chili, anchovy, tomatoes, basil and Parmesan, adding a little olive oil towards the end. This is then mixed over the cooked pasta and the whole dish is scattered with halved cherry tomatoes and some left over basil leaves.
Rocket salad makes another appearance in this recipe. Rocket in a bowl, topped with Parmesan and an olive oil and lemon dressing.
The chicory, once charred on both sides is chopped and sprinkled with olive oil, balsamic vinegar, garlic and rosemary.
We then waited about 2 minutes for the ciabatta to catch up! and we were ready.
The pasta looked great, although hubby was a little put off by the (semi) whole tomatoes:
The rocket salad looked as you would expect and the chicory looked a little lost really, maybe because I had to halve the recipe:
Anyway, this is what the assembled meal looked like on a plate:
The verdict? We both really enjoyed the pasta (although hubby ate around the halved cherry tomatoes) - I halved the recipe as it was just for the 2 of us and it made way too much, but that is ok as we now both have lunch for tomorrow sorted. Rocket salad was ok, pretty standard. I really enjoyed the chicory although I am not entirely certain it was necessary. I like the extra salad bits and it is a way of making the meal go further, but I'm not sure I would bother with both sides next time.
The ciabatta was good. This is definitely something the whole book does really well. Taking a standard ciabatta loaf and making it something delicious. I'm not a fan of bread products really so making them more interesting is good.
And then it came to dessert. I hate trifle, I can't actually remember ever eating it, so I'm not really sure why I have that opinion. However, I love limoncello and raspberries so it was worth a try. My portion looked like this:
It was delicious! And so easy to make. I'm going to keep this recipe on standby if I ever need a quick dessert when I have friends over or if I need to take dessert somewhere.
Timings: 30 minutes ish - would have been more timely had I followed the instructions correctly and not left the ciabatta til last!
