Pasta dish please - truly great comfort food

Pasta, oh glorious pasta. Pasta is one of the food staples we all have in the cupboard for the times when we just want something quick and tasty.

Children tend to love pasta with tomato sauce and my comfort food is spaghetti with olive oil, garlic, chilli and parsley.

It is also an inexpensive food for when times are a bit tougher. I remember times when I had pasta every day simply because money was short.

I also remember an evening when I watched a football match with some Italians in England and how the match was forgotten when we started talking about my comfort dish and passions were flying high as every person seem to have come from a different area in Italy and hence had a different opinion.

Something they all agreed on was the type of sauce for each pasta shape. I learned that you can’t serve certain shapes with certain sauces and one of the reasoning was “because you just can’t”!

I forgot most of the other reasons as the group ventured into Italian as the discussions heated up and I had to zone out. What stuck with me was that lighter sauces go with thin pasta while chunkier sauces go with thicker pasta shapes.

For a ragout sauce (or bolognese as it is known outside of Italy – that started a whole new conversation) you would want pasta the meat sauce can stick to, while lighter sauces should just coat the pasta.

Now, unless you have Italians over for dinner, I wouldn’t be too concerned with the perfect match (I really hope Sabrina forgives me for this) as your taste is the most important factor in deciding how to pair your pasta and sauce.

When I have Little Miss Sophie and her sister over, I made a simple tomato sauce from passata and serve it with fusilli and so far haven’t gotten any complains. When we want something quick but nourishing, I cook spaghetti alio e olio and add pinenuts to it and when I have wild garlic to make pesto, I toss any pasta in it.

One time I even made a pesto out of parsley and walnuts and ate it with fusilli. On one of the very few occasions I made ravioli, I fried fresh sage in butter and drizzled it over the pasta – quite traditional I was told and it tasted fantastic (if you like sage).

Let’s not forget lasagne – I am not too keen on lasagne but once I got fresh pasta sheets from Iago in town and made a cheese lasagne. I mixed ricotta cheese with parmesan and any other cheese I found in the fridge and layered the sheets.

Bechamel sauce (please never buy the white stuff in jars – it ain’t bechamel sauce) poured over, topped with even more cheese, baked and I was in cheesy pasta heaven. A proper lasagne takes ages to prepare as the ragout sauce needs a few hours slow cooking to create that intense flavour you might remember from a trip to Italy.

Oh, and never cook your pasta without salt in the water. It really makes a bit difference to the final dish. I didn’t believe it but I once forgot the salt and the result was rather bland and I needed a lot more seasoning in the final dish.