An Italian affair (or two)

It's been a tasty few weeks here at the not-so-Wednesday-anymore kitchen.

The week before last I discovered this recipe for stuffed pasta shells via one of the vegan communities I'm a member of on LiveJournal. I knew immediately that this was what I had to eat for my next meal. No substitute would be accepted. Except of course that I couldn't find any giant pasta shells at 6pm on a Saturday night. So I made do with medium-sized pasta tubes, maybe 3/4" long and just under 1/2" diameter.

Let me tell you now, these are not big enough. It was only vaguely entertaining trying to scoop tofu 'ricotta' into these little tubes - as though made for the task, I found some miniature spoons in our cutlery drawer (I believe they are in fact 1970's coffee spoons) which made it marginally less difficult. However I think we'd have been a lot less frustrated, and certainly fuller far quicker, with the proper shape and size of pasta.

We also messed with the sauce a little bit, being that we had no onions, but plenty of courgette. Plus we poured the sauce over the pasta prior to baking, instead of after baking as in the original post. Such heresy.

It was really rather good, however, and neither of us regretted the seemingly endless 15 or so minutes of pasta-stuffing whilst we were stuffing our faces with it. I won't bore you by writing the recipe out again, seeing as it's already up on the link.

This week I acquired my very own copy of Isa Chandra Moskowitz's Vegan With a Vengeance. Mango and I were both very excited - Isa is some kind of deity among vegan cooks, author of the magical and ubiqitous Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, amongst others. So this week, and on Wednesday no less, that's where we got our recipe.

Orecchiette with kalamata tapenade and cherry tomatoes

225g orecchiette (that means pasta. Any kind will do, really.)
1 tbsp olive oil
1 medium red onion, sliced thinly
450g cherry tomatoes (they are yummy but any tomatoes will do if you can't afford/don't happen to have cherries!)

Tapenade:
175g pitted kalamata olives
3 tbsp capers (I balked at the price but it really was worth it)
2 cloves chopped garlic
Handful fresh parsley
1/2 tsp dried oregano
1/2 tsp dried tarragon
pepper
1 tbsp red wine vinegar
2 tbsp olive oil

First, make the tapenade by chucking everything in a blender.

Put the pasta on to boil and then saute the onions and tomatoes in the oil for about 7 minutes (make sure you use a big pan - I didn't and had to swap over for the next step). Reserve 125ml pasta water before you drain it. Add the pasta to the tomatoes (hence the tip about the pan) and saute for a few seconds. Then stir in 250ml tapenade (we seemed to have about the right amount, though Isa says the recipe makes enough for double quantities) and the pasta water until it's heated through. Then eat it.

I'm just going to throw in a quote from the recipe blurb here, as I like it and it seems to apply to us pretty well: 'This recipe is for 225g pasta, which is supposedly four servings. If you are like most people I know, four servings = two servings, so plan accordingly.' We always think there's going to be too much food - and yet somehow we always manage to eat it...