Semplice e veloce (e pure sano)

This month's "Heart of the matter" event is devoted to making something quick and easy. Good idea, among all these too big and elaborate meals that we keep having.. So here is something that I like to make, and it's in fact quick and easy (and healthy too)!

Verdure, frutta, tofu e spaghettini giapponesi somen! / Veggies, fruit, tofu and somen noodle!
I make this low-fat stir fry with anything that I find in the fridge. I usually have a bunch of vegetables, in various amounts, and so I prepare this when I'm in a hurry and I don't have too much time to think about something too fancy. In this case there were:
2 broccoli stems and crowns
2 garlic cloves
2 green bell peppers
~1/2 lb white mushrooms
a handful of raw peanuts
a packet of tofu
1 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp low fat sour cream
1 orange
3 mandarins
1 packet somen noodles
soy sauce
To prepare it, cut all the vegetables, fruit and tofu into pieces. Saute the garlic finely minced in oil, then add the tofu and the broccoli stems. Saute on high heat for a few minutes, turning the pieces so that they get nicely browned. Add the peppers and after ~5 minutes, add the mushrooms and the broccoli crowns. Add salt and soy sauce to taste. When things are almost completely cooked, add the pieces of oranges, mandarins and the raw peanuts. Add pepper or other spicy sauce if you like. Cook for another 3 minutes. In the meanwhile, bring a pot of water to boil and throw the somen in. The somen takes three minutes to be cooked. After that, drain and add the low fat sour cream, otherwise the noodles will be all stuck together, since we're not using them in the traditional way (in a soup). In a serving bowl, alternate layers of veggie/tofu mix with the somen.

Note: it's quite hard to mix the somen noodles with the rest, they still tend to stick together even after the sour cream.. so if you don't like this sticky thing, use rice instead, or regular noodles. I used the somen because they're so quick! And they did taste good :) If you want to see what somen noodles are, and another quick and healthy recipe with them, look up my previous post of a somen noodle soup.

So, this recipe is for sweet Ruth for her weekly 'Presto Pasta night' event! I haven't participated to her event in too long!

Tagliatelle ai funghi

I've been thinking about a both pretty and good noodle-dish to make for Bee and Jai's 'Click' event, and in the end I decided that 'Tagliatelle ai funghi' (Mushroom Tagliatelle) would do the trick! I still have to learn a lot about taking pictures, especially at home, where my ambiance lights are not the best at all, and I don't have any sort of small stand for the camera. In any case, this is the result!

Tagliatelle ai funghi/Mushroom tagliatelle
It's a very quick and simple and yet delicious dish to make. Buy some good mushrooms and you're basically done. I used these really good 'portabella' mushrooms:
To make enough sauce for a box of tagliatelle (1 lb), you'll need to double the amount you see in this picture (so about 4 big mushrooms). Then, you'll need a small bunch of parseley, two cloves of garlic and, if possible, some 'panna da cucina'. It's possible to find in the US, although not too easy. Here is how it looks like:
'Panna da cucina' means 'Cream for cooking'. It's indeed cream, but less fatty than heavy cream, and I don't think you could whip it. So, if you don't find it, substitute with half heavy cream and half low-fat sour cream.
To prepare the pasta: bring a large pot of water to boil, and in the meanwhile, wash and cut the mushrooms. Mince the garlic cloves and sautee them in 2 tbsp olive oil for ~30 sec, then add all the mushroom pieces. Add ~1 tbsp salt. Sautee, uncovered, for ~10 min, then cover and keep cooking. When the water boils, add salt (~1 tbsp coarse salt), 1 tsp olive oil, and then throw the pasta in. Mix up so it doesn't stick. Cover, making sure it keeps boiling but it doesn't overflow. Check the mushrooms. If they are tender (depends on how big your pieces were, it should take about 15 minutes total), add chopped parseley, sautee some more, and then add the panna. I used ~1/2 cup. You can add more or less depending on how creamy you like it. You can even go without and use more olive oil. Taste to check that the salt is ok. When the pasta is cooked, drain and pour into the mushroom mixture, sautee for 1 minute, add some black pepper grated on the spot and serve with a leave of parseley for decoration! If you want, you can add grated parmigiano cheese on top, but it doesn't need it.

So, this recipe and picture of course go to Jai and Bee for their 'Click' November event, and also to sweet Ruth for her weekly 'Presto Pasta Nights'!

Pasta con cavoletti di Bruxelles!

A few nights ago I tried to make something as an exploration for the 'Fresh produce of the month' themed on Brussel sprouts, that I'm hosting (click here for details!). So here is what I came up with:

Pasta ai cavoletti di Bruxelles / Brussel sprout pasta
Making it is quite easy. Sautee one small onion in ~2 tbsp olive oil, and add three cups of brussel sprouts cut in half. Sautee them on high heat for about 5 minutes, then add tomatoes (better fresh, otherwise canned, like I did - in the latter case, use whole tomatoes, and dice them in the pan as they become soft. I used a 1 lb can). Add salt to taste. Cook them for another 10-15 min, covered, until the brussel sprouts are soft. Add a few pieces (~1/2 cup) of cheese that can melt. I had some really good Italian cheese (asiago) that I brought from my trip, so that was perfect, but you could use any other meltable and possibly tasty cheese that you can find. Stir with the rest of the sauce for one more minute, then sprinkle some pepper, and mix with the pasta which you will have cooked al dente in the meanwhile. The ratio of vegetables/pasta depends on your taste. I tend to agree with an article that I remember being recently mentioned by Ruth at a 'Presto Pasta night', about the idea of using a lot of vegetable-based sauce for not a lot of pasta. So this amount of sauce would be ok for ~1/2 lb pasta, and would probably be enough for 4 people. But if you're more into pasta, you can have more pasta and less sauce, maybe just grate some more parmigiano cheese on top!
This is going to be one of my entries for the 'Fresh Produce of the Month', and also my entry for this week 'Presto Pasta nights' hosted by Ruth!

Pasta ai broccoli (versione piemontese)

Some time ago I posted a recipe for 'pasta with broccoli' - but it was a Sicilian recipe, and broccoli were actually the dialect name for cauliflower! So, now I'll give a recipe for pasta with the real broccoli. :) We can say it's a Piemontese version, because my mom taught me. :)
This recipe is dedicated to Amit, who asked me specifically for it, and promised he would link my recipe to his great post on broccoli - you can visit it if you want to know some nutritional information on this great vegetable! So, here you are, Amit:
Pasta con i broccoli 'alla Piemontese' / Pasta with broccoli 'Piemontese style'

For 1 lb of pasta, you'll need 3 broccoli. Start boiling the water. In the meanwhile, finely cut half a big yellow onion and sautee it in 2 tbsp olive oil. Cut the 3 broccoli stems into pieces, and add them to the onion. Add salt (~1 tbsp), sautee for ~10 min, then add the crowns cut into small pieces, sautee for another 5 min, then cover the pan and cook for another 5 min. Taste and adjust the salt. At this point, if you're not vegetarian, add 5 anchovies and cook, covered, for another 5 min. The anchovies will melt and give a delicious twist to the flavor of the dish, and won't be strong at all. If you're vegetarian, you can avoid the anchovies, maybe add some garlic to the sautee onion at the beginning, and you'll have a wonderful dish in any case.
When the water boils, add salt and then the pasta. Cook al dente, drain, and add to the pan with the broccoli. Sautee the pasta with the broccoli, add some pepper (red pepper flakes, or ground black pepper) and ~ 2 tbsp grated cheese (pecorino, or parmigiano). This time I decided to innovate a little and add also some sliced almonds to the dish, but this is not in my mom's traditional recipe.
When you serve, add on each plate some more fresh olive oil, and grate more cheese and add more pepper to taste. You'll be delighted!
There are a few 'traditional' variations to this dish:
1) An important variation to this recipe includes the addition of tomatoes (usually canned diced tomatoes, which I add after the onions, and cook for ~ 5 min by themselves before adding the broccoli stems). It's also very good, but this time I really wanted to have the broccoli as the main focus of the dish.
2) Another important variation concerns the way of cooking the broccoli. Some people cook the broccoli in the pasta water, instead of in a separate pan. So, they add the stems together with the pasta when the water boils and the crowns more towards the end of the cooking. So they have in a separate pan only the onions and the anchovies. Then they drain both pasta and broccoli and they sautee them with the pasta. Honestly, although this last version may be the most traditional, I prefer the one I described above. First, you have a better control over the cooking degree of the broccoli, and second, sauteeing the broccoli with the onions and the anchovies since the beginning gives them a nice taste.
This recipe is also my entry to Ruth's fabulous weekly event 'Presto pasta nights'

Pasta con melanzane (Norma e funghetto!)

I realized recently that there are a number of very traditional and very easy Italian pasta recipes that I make quite commonly and I never posted about... So I need to correct this lacking! I'll start here with the description of two versions of Pasta with Eggplants. My next similar post will be dedicated to Pasta with Broccoli, as per Amit's request.. so stay tuned. :)


Pasta alla Norma
This is the most traditional pasta with Eggplant recipe. It's from Sicily, and apparently it was made in honor of Bellini's masterpiece 'Norma' (hence the name). I made it recently at Ellif's, when I was asked to 'guest-chef' an Italian vegeterian dinner: I love eggplants and what's more Italian than pasta?
So, to make this dish, sautee half a big onion in olive oil, add 1 big diced eggplant, fry for ~10 min. Add salt, and one big can of diced canned tomatoes. Add ~1 tbsp salt and 1 tsp sugar if the tomatoes are acidic. Cook for another 20 min. Taste and add salt if necessary. Add ~1/2 cup crumbled ricotta salata (I had to use a mixture of regular soft ricotta and feta cheese, since we didn't find ricotta salata) and stir in the sauce for a few minutes. Then mix with the pasta, cooked 'al dente' (the sauce should be enough for 1 lb). Traditionally you'd use penne, like in the picture above, but other types work too! Sprinkle with basil leaves and serve with extra ricotta salata or pecorino cheese to grate on top, for the people who like extra cheese!

Pasta con melanzane al funghetto / Pasta with eggplant-mushroom style
This is the pasta I made tonight. I found these delicious small, cylindrical so-called 'Italian eggplants', that work perfectly for this type of eggplant dish, 'melanzane al funghetto' (mushroom-style eggplants). The name refers to the fact that if you cook these eggplants with these few tricks that I'm going to give below, they will taste (and smell) like mushrooms. It's true! I always loved 'melanzane al funghetto' and it's a typical way that Italian mothers make eggplants for children who think they don't like eggplants (or restaurant owners who want to cheat not-too-smart customers.. of course the price of mushrooms is not comparable to that of eggplants.. :)).
So to make 'melanzane al funghetto', saute 3 garlic cloves, finely diced, in 3 tbsp olive oil. Add 6 'Italian eggplants' cut into pieces and cook on high heat for ~20 min, adding salt to taste. Stir every once in a while. At the end, add 1/2 cup parseley leaves. That's it! If you try, let me know if you also think that they taste a bit like mushrooms.
For my pasta, I also added ~ 2 cups small Romanitas tomatoes cut in half and 3 tsp capers, cooked for 10 more minutes, and added 1/3 cup feta cheese and some more parseley at the end. Then I added it to my 'tricolor' pasta... it was very good. :)

These eggplants pasta dishes are my entry for the 'Presto Pasta nights' hosted by Ruth at Once Upon A Feast.. Also, I want to point out that Happy Cook just posted about a very similar recipe - I found out because she's using her recipe for my next 'Fresh produce of the month' tomato-centered event!

Pasta giapponese :)

I haven't written a pasta entry for the 'Presto Pasta nights' hosted by Ruth in a while.. lack of camera and of pasta made it happen. :)
But now, Lucas is back with the camera, and I'm back cooking pasta! Another thing I like to try at the Berkeley Bowl (other than strange vegetables and fruit) is Asian type of pasta. So, this time I bought this Japanese noodles that looked like thick and white tagliatelle. All the writings on the box were in Japanese except for a label with the ingredients. So I have no idea of how they would be really called.. but I know they were made of wheat flour.
So the dish I made up was
Tagliatelle giapponesi con peperoni, baby bok choy e tofu / Japanese tagliatelle with peppers, baby bok choy and tofu
To make the sauce, I sauteed half an onion in olive oil, and then added ~5 red small bell peppers, cut into medium-size pieces. Then, I diced 1/2 lb tofu and added it into the pan. Then I added ~1 lb of baby bok choy, cut into pieces. I added 1 tbsp soy sauce and 1 tsp soybean paste, together with lemon juice, to season. I cooked it for ~20 minutes and added salt to taste.
In the meanwhile, I boiled water and added salt and japanese noodles in it (~1 lb). The noodles tended to stick together, so I stirred them well during the cooking. It took ~13 minutes for them to be cooked (they were thick). I drained them and added them to the sauce, and sauteed them in it for a few more minutes..
They were really good! The soybean taste from the sauce and the paste, together with the sourness from the lemon juice, and the slight bitterness of bok choy, mixed deliciously with the sweetness of the red peppers! And the soft consistency of the noodles (softer than regular Italian tagliatelelle) was very nice.
So, check out the Presto Pasta Night summary to see all the nice pasta recipes of this week!

Ravioli e agnolotti fatti in casa

I haven't posted a recipe in a long time.. shame on me! So, I'll try to correct this by talking about something really great that Lucas and I made with Nicola recently: homemade ravioli and agnolotti! Making stuffed pasta is a little more time consuming than making tagliatelle, but it's fun if you're with friends... and you can be proud of the result: :)
We made Ravioli ai formaggi con crema di zucca (Cheese ravioli with butternut squash cream) and Agnolotti al salame con salsa di pomodoro (Salame agnolotti with tomato sauce)
Recipes and more pictures follow!

Pasta dough:
Prepare a dough similar to the one we used for tagliatelle. You can use less eggs and more water, since there's going to be a filling and the pasta doesn't need to be as rich: Nicola's (i.e. Luisa's :) ) recipe was 2 eggs and 2 half egg shells filled with water for 2 1/2 cups flour. Knead till elastic, then pass it through your pasta machine as shown here, till you get many layers of thin dough. For agnolotti you should get to the thinnest setting on the machine, whereas for ravioli, you should leave it a bit thicker.

Ravioli preparation:
Place one sheet of dough on the ravioli shaper, and add a small amount of filling to each hole:
>Humidify with some water the parts that will become ravioli borders, to make them sticky. Then, cover with another sheet of dough:
Pass a rolling pin on this whole thing. The pressure on the borders will cut the ravioli. At this point, you can remove them from the ravioli maker, and place them on a tray.

Agnolotti preparation:
Cut ~3*3 inches squares of pasta. Stuff them with a little filling. Fold the square over the filling, to make a triangle. Fold the upper corner on pasta over the filling, and fold the other two corners around one of your fingers. This will make the agnolotto shape. Sorry, no picture for an individual agnolotto, but you can see here a closeup of the shapes:


Ravioli ai formaggi con crema di zucca (Cheese ravioli with butternut squash cream)
Prepare ravioli as described above. The cheese filling is made by mixing approximately 1/2 lb ricotta, 1/2 cup gorgonzola cheese and 1/2 cup cream cheese (this should be enough for dough made with ~2 1/2 cups flour, very approximatively, sorry about this). To make the sauce, cut a butternut squash into small cubes. Finely cut half a big onion. Sautee the onion, and after ~ 2 min add the squash. Add salt. Cook for ~10 min, covered. Then, add ~2 cups vegetable broth (or water and a bouillon, like I did) and cook covered for ~40 min, until the squash is soft. Puree with a blender. Add ~2 tbsp heavy cream, and pepper to taste.

Agnolotti al salame con salsa di pomodoro (Salame agnolotti with tomato sauce)
Prepare agnolotti as described above, using a filling made with ~ 1 cup finely cut salame mixed with ~1/2 lb cream cheese (dose for ~2 1/2 cups flour, very approximatively, sorry about this again). Prepare the tomato sauce: sautee half a big vidalia onion in olive oil, add 1 lb canned tomatoes, ~2 tsp salt, ~1/2 tsp of sugar, cover with a lid. After ~30 min, blend, add finely cut basil and leaves of sage.

Once everything is ready, bring a large amount of water to boil, add salt and a bit of olive oil to the water, then add the ravioli and agnolotti in, a little bit at a time. They will be cooked in ~5 min. Mix with the sauces and serve immediately!!

This will be also my entry for this week Presto Pasta night! At last I have some pasta worth presenting. :)

Tagliatelle e trofie fatte in casa!

I've been super busy this past week, and I didn't even have time to post about this really cool 'event' that we organized last weekend! My friend Andrea who lives in Berkeley also loves to cook and we've been thinking about organizing something for a while. So last weekend we decided to invite a bunch of people over at his place and have a 'Pasta workshop'!
The idea was to make tagliatelle and trofie ourselves, and prepare three different sauces.. whoever wanted to come help was welcome. My Japanese friends Keisuke, Miako and their lovely son came from the very beginning and were some of the most supportive fans of our pasta!
Making pasta for 25 people turned out to be tiring but fun! And the result was really delicious. I was very happy, also because I never made any of that pasta before. Below is a little summary of what we did and the recipes.

We prepared two different types of tagliatelle - one with sapphron in the dough and one with mushroom water in it, because we wanted to give them a little flavor that would go well with the sauce we were planning on making.
Tagliatelle is an egg rich pasta, so don't be surprised for how many eggs you have to put in the dough! It's going to be enough for a lot of servings, anyway.
We also made trofie, which is a type of pasta typical of Liguria, always hand made, and mostly eaten with pesto.

Dough for tagliatelle:
2.6 lb flour
12 eggs
2 tbsp water
Make a 'volcano' with the flour on a big and clean working surface, break the eggs in the volcano hole and start mixing them together with the dough, kneading them in. You should add as little water as possible to this dough, to make it workable. Then you should work it for at least 10 minutes, until it becomes softer and elastic.
Note: to make the sapphron taqliatelle, dissolve 1/2 tsp sapphron in the water, and to make the mushroom flavored tagliatelle, use water where you boiled dry porcini mushrooms instead.
When you're done, wrap the dough in plastic foil and let it rest for one hour.

Dough for trofie:
2.4 lb flour
2 cups water more or less
2 tbsp salt
Mix all the ingredients and knead for at least ten minutes. Add water if necessary. When done, wrap in plastic foil and let it rest for one hour.

Preparation of tagliatelle:
You need a pasta machine like my wonderful 'La Novecento Torino', which belonged to my greatgrandmother, or a more modern and fancy one. :)
This machine can make very thin sheets of flour like this one:
You have to devide the dough into small flat 'squares', and then pass them through
the machine many times decreasing the width of the slit they go through every time.
You probably shouldn't get to the point of having such long pieces like the one I showed in the picture above, but that was for fun. :)
It's very helpful if you have someone like Luisa with you :)
She was passing me the pieces in the right order, so we could go much faster, and decrease the slit width only every few pieces of dough.
Once you have your dough sheets of the right thickness (i.e., for tagliatelle, the smallest setting I had on the machine), you can add the cutting attachment to the machine and start the real fun part: actually making the tagliatelle!
When you pass the dough through the sharp rolls, the tagliatelle come out.. it's such a wonderful view!
Suggestion: add some flour on the dough before cutting it, and sprinkle more flour on the tagliatelle just made. Set them on a large tray so they don't stack on each other, otherwise they will clump and they won't be as good.
This is how fast we were moving them around on the tray to avoid them clumping:
And this is the tray with the sapphron tagliatelle ready to be cooked:

Preparation of trofie:
Another group of us was making trofie. Trofie don't require and particular instrumentation, just a lot of patient friends. :)
(Elif and Vardha at work)
To make trofie, you have to take tiny pieces of dough and roll them either between your fingers or on the table, and obtain those funny little worms that you see in front of Elif above.

Of course now you're only half way done. Good pasta is nothing if you don't have a good sauce. For tagliatelle, we chose to make a zucchini sauce and a mushroom sauce, and trofie go traditionally with pesto. So here are the recipes for the sauces:

Zucchini sauce
10 small white zucchini
1 white onion
1/2 lb small tomatoes (romanitas)
2 tbsp olive oil
1 tsp sapphron
~3 tsp salt

Cut the onion and the zucchini in small pieces, heat up the olive oil. Sautee the zucchini for a while. Add the sapphron dissolved in water. Add salt. Cover with a lid and let it cook for ~15 min. At the end, add the tomatoes cut in half. Sautee for a few more minutes, add salt, and it's ready to pour on the pasta.

Porcini mushroom sauce
3 porcini mushrooms
1 lb brown mushrooms
6 small shallots
White wine and mushroom water to cook
Parseley

Gently scrape the mushroom surface to remove all the dirt. Remove the parts that are too soft. Cut the mushrooms in thin slices and cook them in a little olive oil, on low heat, adding some salt. Add the shallots finely cut, sautee them with the mushrooms for ~5 minutes, then add ~1/2 cup total white wine and mushroom water if you still have some from the dough and let it cook covered for 5-10 more minutes. Pour on the pasta and add some finely cut parseley before serving.

Traditional pesto sauce
This is the recipe for traditional pesto from Liguria. Anywhere else you won't find the green beans and potatoes with pesto. But it's a really nice addition, you should definitely try it.

1 lb green beans
6 small yellow potatoes
1 big bunch basil
1/2 cup pinenuts
4 cloves garlic
a chunk of pecorino (size depending on how much you like it)
Olive oil

Cut the green beans and the onions in small pieces. Cook them in salted boiling water for ~10 min. Drain and cool down with cold water and set aside. In a blender, finely chop basil, pinenuts, pecorino, garlic. Take out of the blender and add enough olive oil to cover well. If you didn't add much pecorino, you may have to add some salt. When the pasta is ready, mix the basil mix and the beans and potato mix with it. Serve hot with trofie for a real Liguria dish.

All the pasta must be cooked in a lot of salted boiling water, turning from time to time to avoid clumping. Tagliatelle take only ~ 3 minutes, whereas trofie take a bit longer. Trofie will start floating after a while, but they'll need to cook a little longer before they're done.

Nicola took care of this part:
When the pasta is cooked, mix with the sauce immediately and serve as soon as possible.
Here is Andrea serving the first pasta that came out:
And here are the final creations!
Tagliatelle con zafferano e zucchini (Sapphron and zucchini tagliatelle):

Tagliatelle ai funghi porcini (Porcini mushroom tagliatelle)

Trofie al pesto
Every time we brought one of these bowls out, they were completely finished in the first 5 minutes. Everyone was really impressed - it's not that common to have fresh pasta here! And to be honest, I was also really impressed. I never made it before, and it was absolutely delicious!
I'm submitting this entry to the "Presto pasta nights" hosted by my friend Ruth at Once Upon a Feast, although the whole pasta making wasn't presto at all: we started at 4.30 pm and we were eating at 8 pm.. but it was a meal for 25 people, starting from scratch! If you buy your pasta, making the sauces I described above is really fast indeed.

Insalata di pasta tiepida con verdure e ananas alla griglia

This is going to be my weekly pasta entry for 'Presto Pasta nights' hosted by Ruth at Once upon a feast. I made it tonight and it was really good, so I thought it would be the best one to share for the week.

Insalata di pasta tiepida con verdure e ananas alla griglia (Warm pasta salad with grilled vegetables and pineapple)
(The doses I will refer to are for 2 people). Prepare ~1/3 lb rotelle pasta, cooked al dente (remember to put salt in the boiling water before throwing the pasta!). Drain, add a little olive oil and mix up (to prevent sticking). Let cool down. In the meanwhile, cut one eggplant in slices and grill it. Cut 2 small green zucchinis in slices and grill them too. Cut three slices of pineapple and grill those too. Cut two small tomatoes in halves and grill the halves too. Once everything is grilled, cut in smaller pieces (the pineapple and the eggplant slices in quarters, the tomato halves and the zucchini slices in half). Mix up with the pasta. Add small cubes of a hard cheese (for example, I love ricotta salata) and mix again. Season with a sauce made with olive oil, lemon and finely cut garlic, then add salt, oregano and pepper to taste... serve warm or cold... DELICIOUS!

Pasta ai 'broccoli' alla siciliana!

A few days ago I talked to my friend Maia, who's from Sicily, and she showed me some pictures of food they cooked. I was very interested in some type of pasta that I saw, which had some white pieces in it, and some raisins and pinenuts clearly visible. I asked what it was, and she said it was pasta with broccoli Sicilian style. I couldn't see anything green in it, so I asked her where the broccoli were... and she explained to me that broccoli in Sicilian language are cauliflower! The problem is that 'broccoli' in Italian refers to the same vegetable that you know in English.. so, it's a bit confusing, but very intriguing. :) Thus, I looked for a recipe online for this pasta, and I prepared it for Giovanna, Vardha (and of course Lucas and I :) ) last Saturday.

Pasta con 'broccoli' alla siciliana ('Broccoli' pasta Sicilian style)
Ingredients
1 1/2 lb cauliflower
1 lb short pasta (e.g. maccheroni)
1/2 cup pinenuts
1/2 cup raisins
1 onion
1 tsp saffron
basil leaves and bread crumbs (optional)
pecorino (romano), grated
Procedure:
Soak raisins in warm water. Cut cauliflower in small pieces. Bring a large amount of water to boil. Add salt (N.B. I usually add ~ 1 tbsp for quart of water, more or less). Throw the pasta in the boiling water. In the meanwhile, sautee the onion, add the pinenuts and the raisins, drained from their water, and the saffron, previously dissolved in 1 tbsp boiling water taken from the pasta water. Cook for a few minutes. Five minutes before the pasta is done, throw the cauliflower pieces in the water with the pasta. Drain the pasta and the cauliflower when the pasta is done (if you timed it right, the cauliflower should be done too). Stir the pasta and cauliflower in the pinenut/raisin sauce. Add grated cheese, ground black pepper before serving. You can also add basil leaves roughly cut and bread crumbs, quickly roasted in the oven, before serving. I didn't use almost any basil and no bread crumbs, this time. The pasta was wonderful!
Also, this was a vegeterian version. For non-vegetarian, add 6 anchovies to the raisin/pinenut sauce, let them cook with it before stirring the pasta in.
The day after, a great way to eat this pasta is to reheat it in the oven, after covering its surface with a bit more grated cheese and bread crumbs. When it's warm, just turn on the broil for 2 minutes. The pasta will have a wonderful crust on top!

I decided I will give this recipe as my first entry to 'Presto Pasta' night, that I recently found out. It's a weekly event hosted by nice Ruth at Once upon a Feast. That's such a nice idea! And I make some sort of pasta definitely every week, so I may contribute often :)