Name: Trapani rigatoni
Prep time: 10 min
Cook time: 10 min
Total time: 20 min
Ingredients: 500 gr rigatoni ((pasta)); 40 gr parmesan cheese; 100 gr almonds (whole blanched ); 2 cloves garlic; 1-2 red chili peppers (fresh, Remove seeds (optional)); 2 bunches basil; 4 anchovy fillets ( in oil); 450 gr cherry tomatoes (preferably red and yellow ones if you can find them); olive oil

This delicious and easy pasta dish comes from one of Jamie’s books (30 minutes) and yes, it is done and cooked in 20 minutes total. So perfect for a quick weeknight meal. It’s a little light on the veggies though so serve with a green salad!

Trapani rigatoni

It was time… It had been too long ago that Charlotte and myself (and Winfried) cooked up something fun together.. Well actually that is not even entirely true as Charlotte is also part of our cooking club so it’s not really that long, but cooking with more then two/three in this case does not count.. 🙂 And quite frankly it is more or less and excuse to get together and have fun. And what better way to do that then in the kitchen. It was also on the first day of spring so a gorgeous gorgeous sunny day (I love spring don’t you? Flower buds and blossom are still a bit hesitant, but promise is in the air for sure!) After my failure with the buns earlier I figured I needed to make a bread that I knew how to do and it was easy to pick my pumkin-walnut focaccia that we so loved the last time I made it.

Jamie Oliver’s 30 minute meals

It’s almost become kind of thing for us to make a Jamie Oliver recipe every time we cook together. Possibly because the only decent cookbook that Charlotte owns is a Jamie cookbook (o, hahaha… sorry Charlotte, couldn’t resist..) so the rest is history… I had gotten Jamie’s 30 minute meals for Christmas and while I love browsing through it I hadn’t actually made any recipes out of it yet. So we very quickly agreed on what we were gonna make. And this trapani rigatoni was one of the dishes on the menu.

That same morning while reading through my stack of cookbooks in bed (do you do that too? Read cookbooks in bed??) I had already seen the dessert I fancied, which was a trifle of sorts with limoncello. We still had limoncello in the freezer from our trip to Italy so I figured it would be perfect for this! It didn’t take long for Charlotte to be convinced (2 seconds maybe?) as one look at the recipe and she was convinced too. It is that good!

I’ve always been a little hesitant to really believe the 30 minute menus. I mean, sure I can do a dish in 30 minutes as I love doing quick dishes during the weekdays, but a whole 3-course menu in 30 minutes seemed a bit too much too handle. But since we made two of the recipes of this particular 30 minute meal (we skipped the salad) I am inclined to think that it can actually be done.

The trapani rigatoni is incredibly tasty and the only thing is that you do need a food processor or blender to make this, otherwise it’s possibly much longer. But we all loved the pasta, which is virtually vegetarian apart from the anchovy that goes in the sauce. Tom – always a meat eater – did not even complain that he didn’t get any meat. (he did complain that we did not make a more fancier menu after having been in the kitchen the entire afternoon, but he doesn’t get the ‘girls-need-to-be-able-to-talk-too’ thing… 🙂

I will give you both the recipe for the limoncello trifle and the pasta you can find here and I would really encourage you to make both! (plus the focaccia too….!! Sooo good!)