Monday 3 May 2010

A twist on pasta aglio e olio


December 2010 Update: I have discovered that I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Ila of I Nom Things, who is the mystery blogger. I found the recipe, untagged, in the depths of my delicious bookmarks. Now I can properly give her the credit she deserves, because I love this recipe. You can find it here.

I have only recently discovered Foodgawker. Since my discovery, my list of blogs to read and things to cook has grown exponentially and I just can't keep track of them anymore. I have decided that with all the long weekends around at the moment, I am going to reorganise my delicious bookmarks and try and get them in some semblance of order.

This simple pasta dish was one that I found while trolling through Foodgawker but my head must have been somewhere else because I didn't bookmark it and now I can't find where it came from. So, if it was your blog that inspired me to twist up my standard pasta aglio e olio (pasta with garlic and oil), thank you so much. I wish I knew who you were.

I know this is the second quick pasta dish in a row, but we do love our pasta here. Especially quick, easy pastas. D even makes a wonderful pasta aglio e olio when I can convince him to cook it. Our standard version puts the pasta on to cook and while it's bubbling away, you heat a small amount of olive oil with some chopped or crushed garlic and some chilli flakes. When the garlic starts to go brown at the edges, you take it off the heat and the mix it through the cooked pasta.

The mixed up version takes it one step further. While the pasta is cooking and the oil is heating, you add 1 tbs lemon juice, some chopped basil leaves, some grated parmesan cheese and some pepper to a bowl, then add the garlic and oil and pasta and stir together. This dish walks a fine line between being tasty and being too oily, but the lemon does a wonderful job of cutting through that oiliness and the freshness of the basil is a great addition.

Thank you mystery blogger!

3 comments:

  1. MMMMMMMmmmm yum! What a fresh dish.

    I love foodgawker.I read it most days :)

    www.brisbanebaker.blogspot.com

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'm a little bit obsessive when it comes to these sort of things, so I've started at the beginning and am working my way through, ever so slowly. I had gone through 200 or so pages and realised that I would miss 3-4 pages every day when they updated the site. I couldn't let that go, so I've gone back to the beginning and I'm keeping track of it by entry number. :)

    I love this dish though. I'm a sucker for pasta and rice dishes - in fact, skip the dishes, I can happily eat bowls of plain pasta and rice. D finds that a bit boring though, so it's great to have some easy tasty variations.

    ReplyDelete
  3. If you're new to foodgawker, do you know about TasteSpotting and Photograzing? There's even TasteStopping for photos that weren't good enough for the other sites!

    ReplyDelete