When I was a kid, spaghetti meant one thing: bolognese. Fuck it. Pasta meant one thing. No, actually, it meant three: there was lasagne and something I'd heard about, but never tasted, called ravioli. Meat sauce inside the pasta? Crazy.
In adulthood, when I started earning money that I pretty much spent entirely on cookbooks and food, I learned that pasta is a magical ingredient. It's comforting. It's filling. It's versatile. Bolognese is nice, yeah, but pasta--good quality pasta--can be just as delicious with the addition of a few cheap ingredients. The possibilities are endless.
In case you haven't picked up on it by now, the food of my childhood was pretty bland. My parents couldn't afford to take us to restaurants much. We ate the same kind of stuff over and over. Pan-fried crumbed chicken breasts. Roast chicken with Gravox gravy. Or maybe chicken drumsticks with apricot sauce from a packet. Rissoles with the afore-mentioned Gravox gravy. My dad's spaghetti bolognese, which still and always will have a place on my death row degustation menu. Grow up like this and even Jamie Oliver or whoever's spaghetti with mussels--a meal for two that costs maybe six dollars to make--is a revelation.
I'm getting side-tracked here. Let me wrangle this post back onto the rails. There. Spaghetti a la ligurienne. 'A la ligurienne' is a term applied to 'large cuts of meat garnished with small stuffed tomatoes alternating with a saffron risotto shaped in dariole moulds and piped duchess potatoes brushed with egg yolk and browned in the oven.' Spaghetti a la ligurienne contains no rice, saffron, potato or tomato. It is pretty much just pasta with a pesto sauce. Can't go wrong with that.
The pesto sauce is prepared, at least in part, two hours before the pasta is cooked. You let two cloves of garlic (peeled and crushed) set in 60 mL of olive oil with 40 grams of crumbled Pecorino Romano cheese, 25 grams of pine nuts and 2 basil sprigs. How much is a spring? I wasn't sure about that. I did an image search--seriously--for 'basil sprig' and was shown sort of what I expected. A bit of stem with three or five leaves. So I put that much basil in. When it came to mixing the pesto I found that the cheese was overpowering the basil and that the pesto was yellow. I added a lot more basil, as well as a couple of drops of vinegar, to attain a more balanced flavour and pleasant colour. Season to taste with salt and pepper.
There's not much to this dish. Once your pesto is made you cook some spaghetti (I accidentally bought spaghettini instead).
And stir the pesto through the pasta ...
Very good.
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