Pasta Alla Puttanesca

Today, after our seminar, Holly and I had to go and look at a Campo (or square) for some homework - essentially using this as an excuse to go sit in a bar we trekked for 30 minutes across the Rialto to find this place. It took us longer than expected as a quick detour to find H&M (I needed some shoes as my only comfortable ones are sandals and its cooling down fast here in Venice) resulted in us ending up past the Rialto and not finding H&M at all. So by the time we had visited the campo and caught the vaporetto back home, we were hungry and I could only be bothered to make something easy.

Pasta Alla Puttanesca (or Whore's Pasta?!) is a tomato based pasta dish flavoured with a little chilli, anchovies and olives. For those of you who just went 'ew anchovies' don't be put off - I don't like them either, they are slimy and smell weird but they do wonders with a pasta sauce.

Serves 6 (or 4 hungry students)

Ingredients:
1 Small Onion (Finely chopped)
3 Cloves Garlic (Finely chopped)
3 Little Red Chillies (Remove seed and chop finely - DON'T TOUCH YOUR EYES)
5 Small Anchovies (From a jar is fine - chop them finely)
1 Small Jar Black Olives (Pitted is best)
1 Large Jar Passata
Salt, Pepper, Olive Oil
Oregano
1 Packet Pasta Shapes or Spaghetti

Put a pan of water on to boil with a little salt.
Fry the onions, garlic and chilli in a little olive oil to soften before adding the passata, add the olives and anchovies and leave to simmer for 5-10 minutes on a low heat. Cook the pasta until Al Dente, drain and add to the sauce.

I served this with sliced ciabatta and a salad with a balsamic dressing. You can't taste any anchovies (if it had tasted fishy, my mum would be in big trouble as this recipe was her idea). I intended this dish to serve the four of us with left overs for tomorrow lunch, but we ate it all... a whole packet of pasta and over half a ciabatta. Safe to say, our pasta to salad ratio was not acceptable.

 

To Mummy Tatlow - I promise not to fatten Emily up with too much pasta in future!