Shared Kitchen

Plenty of bang for your buck

Check out Rag Noodles with Fresh Walnuts (below). This is a super-simple dish to make, and the perfect home for a first attempt at making pasta. You can use all the raggedy pieces and make them look like you meant them to look this way!

Fresh pasta versus dried

The texture of quality dried pasta is like worn suede, if you can imagine that, not smooth, not furry but somewhere in between.

101 Making Pasta

Don’t despair if your first attempts produce holey shredded dough (mine did!) because with a little practice you’ll soon be turning out silky smooth sheets of pasta like a pro.

Bolognese Sauce with Pappardelle

This is a Biuso family classic, less meaty and more tomato-ey than some, but with the essential backbone of garlic, red wine and nicely softened vegetables that meld into the sauce rather than sticking out like beacons.

Rag Noodles with Fresh Walnuts

This sauce is made in less time than it takes to cook pasta. I love it for that but also for its simplicity.

Semolina

Make semolina your friend when rolling out fresh pasta.

Parmesan cheese, grana cheese and grana padano

Those Italians! How can you not love a cheese whose recipe remains unchanged since at least the thirteenth century?

Home is where the heart is

Home-cooked meals. Don’t you love them? It’s something most of us think about, dream about, reminisce about. If you were lucky, a mother, grandmother, or an auntie, or someone who emanated cheerfulness, warmth, caring and love (they were all women when I grew up, but don’t take offence, slip in whoever it was, or whoever you wanted it to be), stood by the stove, stirring pots of gorgeousness (yep, that’s a word), food that smelled so good you couldn’t wait to eat it, food that tasted so good you licked the plate clean (well, as a kid …), and food that spread such a wonderful feeling of happiness deep in the pit of your stomach. Read more …