Thursday 8 April 2010

Pasta - Yum!

Sadly, this blog's been a little abandoned recently. You see, I'm doing my masters at Oxford at the moment, and my thesis is due in (eek!) 2 1/2 weeks. That's not much time! So in the last month or so, it's been pretty solid work. The whole things has to be 30 000 words long. Double spaced, that's over 100 pages, I think. And it's a lot of words. Not all of which are written quite yet... So it's keeping me pretty busy.
Last week I went home for Pesach/Passover. Whilst the food that we cook at that time of year is always nice - I mean you can't go wrong with roast chicken, grilled fish etc - it gets pretty boring. No meal is good. Well, breakfast is ok, you can have fruit, and yogurt, and that's all I ever really have for breakfast. But lunches get boring. We have soup, or salads with fish or cheese, but they would always be improved by some nice bread. And the cheese is never as nice. And having potatoes every night with dinner... it gets dull.

Any, the end of Pesach is always great, you get to eat all those things you've missed for a week. To celebrate the end, my family and I went to Wahaca, definitely one of my all time favourite restaurants. We had lots of tortilla chips with guacamole and frijoles, and then we all had amazing steak burritos. It was sooo good!

That night I returned to Oxford with the boyfriend, to spend some quality time in the library (fun fun). There's nothing quite like weeks spent getting up, going to the library, having lunch, going back to the library, leaving at 7 when it closes, having dinner, and working until you can't keep your eyes open. Then doing it all again. Honestly, without him to have meals with/talk to/cuddle I'd go crazy! Anyway...
I demanded pasta on the first night we were back. We went to Tescos and looked at the reduced to clear stuff for inspiration. We bought some pieces of squash and some salad, reduced, and then added fresh pesto and spinach. So dinner was fairly simple, but so good.

Somehow, we ended up having pasta again last night, but this time, with sardines, because that's what we had. It was a quick, throw together pasta, but it was really good!


Excuse the messy bowl - I nearly forgot to take a photo!


Spaghetti with sardines and capers: (for 2)
Spaghetti for 2 (rather a lot if this 2 includes my boyfriend)
One tin of sardines, drained
A couple of large handfuls of capers
One chilli
Two cloves of garlic
One tin of tomatoes

Start by cooking the spaghetti. (Ideally you'd get your boyfriend to deal with this so that you can get started on the sauce. However, he may be pre-occupied by making the salad, which is obviously a complex task, so you may need to do it yourself).

Then chop the chilli and the garlic and put in a pan with some olive oil. Cook until they are obviously starting to cook.
Add tin of tomatoes and stir.
Add sardines (kind of separate them out with a fork as you go) and capers.
Stir, and season.

That's pretty much it. The sauce takes about as long as the pasta. It was so good, we nearly forgot to take a picture! I'm going to submit it to Presto Pasta Nights, which is my favourite weekly blog event! This week it's being hosted by Daphne of More than Words.