Rigatoni with Sweet Tomatoes, Eggplant, and Mozzarella

Before we left Australia to come to the UK, we sold pretty much all of our belongings. Bizarrely, one of the things I was most sad to get rid of was all my old cooking magazines. I had a couple of years of Delicious and Super Food Ideas and while I couldn't justify keeping them, it was a bit sad to see them go. That became more critical when it appeared that one of the magazines I sold contained a Jamie Oliver pasta recipe that Kyle loved and was nowhere to be found on the internet.

From memory, we recalled the recipe included aubergine, mozzarella stirred through at the end so it just melts, tinned tomato and chilli. Every so often, I did a browse around the internet to try and find the recipe. It is the internet - everything is on there! Finally, my persistence paid off and I found the recipe on some pregnancy forum! It was slightly different to how we remembered, but it had been a while.

We were so excited and looked forward to the two year plus reunion with this dish. And it was disappointing. I mean, not bad but kinda bland. What was going on?

Jamie Oliver's language is always quite distinctive and the writer of the forum post had used a sentence that reminded me of how Jamie writes, so I decided to google that:

The mozzarella should be just about to melt and a bit stringy at this point cooked by the heat of the sauce.

Bingo! This post came up first (along with three others) and it turns out the recipe is from Jamie's Dinners (not that secret after all!) and the first recipe missed out the vital ingredient - chilli!

The lengths we go to to find a recipe! We haven't yet, but we will give this another try.

Rigatoni with Sweet Tomatoes, Eggplant and Mozzarella
by Jamie Oliver from Jamie’s Dinners
Serves 4

This is a dish I’ve had many times in Italy, on the Amalfi coast. It’s one of those dishes that tastes like home — it’s comfort food, and it makes you feel good. The interesting thing about it is that the cow’s-milk mozzarella is torn up and thrown in at the last minute so that when you dig your spoon in you get melted, stringy bits of it — a real joy to eat. You can eat this as soon as it’s made, or you can put it all into a baking pan with a little cheese grated on top and reheat it as a baked pasta dish the next day, if you wish.

Ingredients
1 firm ripe pink, black, or white eggplant
Extra-virgin olive oil
2 garlic cloves, peeled and sliced
1 onion, peeled and finely chopped
Two 14-ounce cans good-quality plum tomatoes
1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 to 2 fresh or dried chilies, chopped or crumbled, optional
Bunch fresh basil, leaves ripped and stalks sliced
4 tablespoons heavy cream
1 pound rigatoni or penne
7 ounces cow’s-milk mozzarella
1 piece Parmesan cheese, for grating

Method
1. Remove both ends of the eggplant and slice it into 1/2 inch slices, then slice these across and finely dice into 1/2 inch cubes. Some people prefer to season their eggplant with salt and let it sit for a while in a colander to draw out the bitterness, but I don’t really do this unless I’m dealing with a seedy, bitter eggplant. This dish is really best made using a firm silky one.

2. Now, put a large saucepan on the heat and drizzle in 4 to 5 tablespoons of extra-virgin olive oil. When it’s hot, add the cubes of eggplant, and as soon as they hit the pan stir them around with a spoon so they are delicately coated with the oil and not soaked on one side only. Cook for about 7 or 8 minutes on a medium heat.

3. Then add the garlic and onion. When they have a little color, add the canned tomatoes and the balsamic vinegar. Stir around and season carefully with salt and pepper. At this point, if you wanted to give the dish a little heat you could add some chopped fresh or crumbled dried chilli, but that’s up to you. Add the basil stalks, and simmer the sauce nice and gently for around 15 minutes, then add the cream.

4. While the sauce is simmering, bring a large pan of salted water to the boil and add the pasta, cook according to the package instructions until it is soft but still holding its shape, then drain it, saving a little of the cooking water. I like to put the pasta back into the pot it was cooked in with a tiny bit of the cooking water and a drizzle of olive oil and move it around so it becomes almost dressed with the water and oil.

5. At this point add the lovely tomato sauce to the pasta. By now the eggplant will have cooked into a creamy tomatoey pulp, which is just yum yum yum! Season carefully to taste with salt and pepper. When all my guests are sitting round the table, I take the pan to the table, tear up the mozzarella and the fresh basil, and fold these in nicely for 30 seconds. Then very quickly serve into bowls. By the time your guests start to eat, the mozzarella will have started to melt and will be stringy and gorgeous and really milky-tasting. Just lovely with the tomatoes and eggplant. Serve at the table with a block of Parmesan cheese and a grater so that everyone can help themselves.

Baked Cauliflower and Broccoli Cannelloni

I have been trying to cook more vegetarian food lately. Not for any great political or health reason, but just because it seems like a good thing to do and a way to create more variety in what we eat.

I remembered Jamie Oliver cooking this Incredible Baked Cauliflower and Broccoli Cannelloni on the Jamie at Home TV series and as he is wont to do, he raved about how much everyone - meat eaters included - would love this dish. I must admit, if it wasn't a JO recipe (his recipes are consistently good), I doubt I would ever have tried this. I mean, mushed up cauliflower and broccoli? Doesn't really jump out at you, does it!

But Jamie comes through again, ever reliable. It was a reasonably easy, if somewhat time-consuming dish to make, but as it was a Sunday, I enjoyed pottering around the kitchen to create a really yummy end result.

The broccoli and cauliflower are boiled and then pan-fried for about 20 minutes with lots of garlic, anchovies (okay, not 100% vegetarian), chillies and thyme.


When they are soft, they are mashed up and cooled and then piped into cannelloni tubes. The mixture doesn't look particularly good, but was actually quite tasty. It would probably make a nice dip or spread on crostini at this stage.

The sauces are passata, plus a 'quick white sauce' of creme fraiche and parmesan. A whole bunch of basil goes on top with lots of mozzarella and more parmesan before it is all baked into a steaming, cheesy, enormous dish of pasta. It is quite funny - cauliflower and broccoli are hardly the most flavoursome ingredients in the world, so you get the impression that everything else has been chosen to pack as much flavour in as possible. Oh, did I mention it is probably the most fattening dish I've made in a while with all that cheese and creme fraiche?

But never mind that, it was super tasty, quite unusual and made so much, that we were eating it for days! I served it with watercress dressed in lemon juice and olive oil, which also deserves a mention. Watercress is another one of those very British ingredients I read about all the time and my fruit & vegie shop finally had some. Bit disappointing after all the hype, actually - just tasted like random salad leaf. You win some, you lose some . . .

Incredible Baked Cauliflower and Broccoli Cannelloni
From Jamie at Home
Serves 4 to 6 (or 2 for a very long time!)

sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
500g broccoli, washed, florets and stalks chopped
500g white cauliflower, washed, florets and stalks chopped
olive oil
7 cloves of garlic, peeled and finely sliced
a small bunch of fresh thyme, leaves picked
25g tin of best quality anchovies in oil, drained and chopped, oil reserved
2-3 small dried chillies, crumbled
500ml passata
red wine vinegar
500ml creme fraiche
200g Parmesan cheese, finely grated
16 cannelloni tubes
a small bunch of fresh basil, leaves picked
200g mozzarella cheese
extra virgin olive oil
salad leaves (Jamie says rocket, we used watercress)
1 lemon

Preheat the oven to 190C. Bring a large saucepan of salted water to the boil and drop in the chopped broccoli and cauliflower. Boil for 5 to 6 minutes, until cooked, then drain in a colander, reserving the cooking water.

Heat a wide saucepan, pour in a couple of good glugs of olive oil and add the garlic. Fry for a few seconds, then add the thyme leaves, anchovies, anchovy oil and chillies and continue frying for a few seconds more before adding the cooked broccoli and cauliflower with around 4 tablespoons of the reserved cooking water. Stir everything together, put a lid on the pan leaving a little gap, and cook slowly for 15 to 20 minutes, sitrring regularly. Remove the lid for the last 5 minutes to let the moisture evaporate, then use a potato mashed to crush the veg. Take the saucepan off the heat, taste the vegetables and season carefully with salt and pepper.

Spread the mixture on a baking tray to cool. Meanwhile, get yourself another baking dish or roasting tray (the right size for fitting the cannelloni tubes snugly side by side - test this by actually laying the tubes into the dish, then remove them and put to one side) and pour in the passata with a pinch of salt and a swig of red wine vinegar.

Now, to make a really quick and easy white sauce, mix the creme fraiche with half the Parmesan, a sprinkling of salt and pepper and a little of the reserved cooking water to thin it down.

Spoon your cooled broccoli and cauliflower mixture into a large sandwich bag and cut off the corner. Twist the top of the bag and squeeze it to pipe the filling into the cannelloni tubes. Fill the tubes up and place then in a single layer on top of the passata. Lay the basil leaves over the cannelloni and spoon the white sauce evenly over the top. Season with black pepper, sprinkle over the remaining Parmesan and tear over the mozzarella. Drizzle with extra virgin olive oil and bake in the preheated oven for 30 to 40 minutes, or until golden and bubbling on top.

Dress the salad leaves with a squeeze of lemon juice and about three times as much extra virgin olive oil. Serve the cannelloni with the salad (Jamie suggests crusty bread as well, but we didn't need it).

Can I compete with the Italians?

We arrived back in London from Venice at around 2pm, a bit tired and a bit sad that I only ate pasta once. So I decided to make my own. Having been a little disappointed with my recent attempt at Beef Ragu, I decided to up the ante and look for a recipe with more ingredients, more cooking time and more WOW factor. I found it in Delia Smith's Authentic Ragu Bolognese. This recipe had plenty of good ingredients - two types of mince, bacon, chicken livers, heaps of tomato paste, red wine - and a whopping 4 hours cooking time! How could you go wrong?

You couldn't really. I served the sauce with some egg tagliatelle and parmesan and it was gorgeous. Rich deep flavours of meat and tomato and you could definitely taste the flavour of the chicken livers (if you're not a big fan of chicken livers, I'd probably suggest reducing the amount, but don't leave them out altogether!). This was a great recipe for anyone with serious Italian pasta cravings! And of course, it made an enormous amount, so you can freeze it and have it over and over again.