The Italian job !

Italian food is wonderful!
Italians cook their food with love and take immense pride in it.
They use simple/fresh ingredients and turn it into something magical.
Inspired by the numerous cooking shows on TV and all the cooking blogs I read on the Internet, I decided, enough was enough.. I should get down and 'get my hands dirty'.(If you know what I mean!)

So, here is what we had for lunch, on that lazy Sunday........

• Pasta in red Sauce with mushrooms, black olives and bacon.

• Garlic bread with cheese, olives and chillies

FIRST, we went shopping for the ingredients, and NO, we did not end up in buying a pack of Maggi pazzta and adding boiling water to it !!

We looked about, asked questions, and read carefully all the ingredients and instruction on numerous bottles of goodies, before buying what we did.

This is what we ended up buying :

• Delmonte spiral pasta
• A bottle of red pasta sauce (basically a thick paste of tomato,oregano,onions,garlic and mixed spices/herbs)
• A pack of Italian seasoning which included Basil,oregano,thyme and rosemary
• Pitted black olives
• Roasted crushed garlic flakes
• Crushed chilli flakes
• Olive oil
• Mozarella cheese
• Bread and 
• Bacon (against my wife's wishes!!)

• Parmesan cheese -- Unfortunately we could not find it even after roaming in the three biggest stores nearby
• Also, what we would have loved would be some sun dried tomatoes, but again no luck there.

First the Pasta ::

To boil the pasta, boil 1 litre of water and add some salt.
Next add the pasta with a little oil and let it boil for 15 minutes, until tender.

For the sauce, which is the most important ingredient, we need to chop up one small onion very finely, so that it melts into the sauce and not be visible.
Next chop up a few mushrooms, but ensure you do not chop them too small, else they will just melt. I love to be able to bite into my mushrooms.
Remove a few black olives from the bottle and wash them to remove the brine off it, and chop them to form small rings.

Now, heat some olive oil in a thick bottom pan, and add the onions and saute them. Next in, add generous amount of the pasta sauce. Toss in the mushrooms and the olives. Dust in some of the great Italian seasoning and some roasted garlic flakes.
Add the crushed chilli flakes and some ground pepper for hotness.
Add a little bit of water and let it simmer.
The beautiful sauce is now ready!!
Toss in the strained pasta and mix well.
Pour in some cream and sprinkle parmesan cheese. If you do not get hold of parmesan cheese, you can also add a dollop of butter.
Stir well and cover the lid and let it simmer for 5 minutes.

This is the absolute optional part --
I had bought some smoked bacon, which I stir fried on a frying pan and added a few strips to my pasta..  My wife was just happy that I used a different vessel to cook it and added it only in my plate and spared her !
You can also try to add some boiled chicken or a few slices of sausages, as an alternative, or just forget all of this and enjoy a nice vegetarian pasta ..



In the 5 minutes, while the pasta is cooking slowly, we can quickly prepare the Cheese Garlic Bread.
Slice up the bread, apply some butter.
Grate some mozarella/processed cheese onto these slices.
Add a few rings of black olives, roasted garlic flakes, sprinkle some salt+pepper and add some green chillies (if you want! - optional. Chillies kind of make it indianised )
Put this into an oven or grill and let it sit there for 3/5 minutes, till the cheese melts and gets brownish on the outside.


Well, thats it about the cooking! Time to get down to business.

Pour the pasta into a deep dish (deep! coz you need to hold the sauce in it, for you to slurp it later) and keep a piece of that soft garlic bread handy in case you get the urge to bite into one, in between mouthfuls of pasta !!!