What follows is a bit of a culinary detective story.
We spent a weekend at a friends’ house not too long ago. On arrival after a long child-frazzled car journey (sound familiar) our friends served an absolutely delicious spaghetti with a slightly pungent but also tangy and sweet tomato sauce.
The ingredients were anchovies, pine nuts, garlic and raisins. And – get this – it took them no more than 20 minutes to prepare. I know because I was still sipping my first post-family trip glass of wine when the food was conjured.
So now it’s our turn to try and replicate the dish. We know it was Jamie Oliver inspired but we couldn’t find it in the latest Oliver family cookbook we had. So I went online and tracked down his Pasta con acchiughe e pomodoro reproduced in Epicurious.com.
Here’s how we made the dish.
We took:
A handful of pine nuts
A handful of raisins
two small (15 oz) cans of tomatoes
12 salted anchovy fillets (from a jar)
Enough spaghetti for four
Then we:
Got the spaghetti going…and we toasted the pine nuts for a couple of minutes. Then we added the anchovies, raisins and pine nuts to the tomatoes and cooked on a medium heat for 10 minutes until the anchovies had dissolved into the sauce.
We drained the pasta and tossed it in the sauce.
We served, ate and marveled. You will too.
- Matthew
oh, I know this is a dumb question, but does ‘small’ can of tomatoes mean ~15 oz?
This sounds amazing! Even, dare I utter it, something my kids might eat. They live on pasta, the older girl has decided she likes tomato sauce…and they both like tangy/salty. So…We’ll give a try. If it works, I’ll send chocolates!
Sounds amazing, im pretty sure my kids will love the recipe, thanks