I’m sure that right now you’re saying, either aloud and making all your work-mates turn to look at you, or more sensibly, in your head so that nobody knows that you’re not working, “What the heck is Ciceri e Tria??!!!”.  Well, that’s what I said when I first heard of these words when we were in Puglia a few weeks ago.  Ciceri e tria simply means chickpeas and tagliatelle in the Puglese dialect.  I ate it for the first time at a marvelous  family-run restaurant in Lecce called Alle Due Corti .  Rosalba de Carlo, the matriarch of the family and restaurant founder, oversees all the diners from a table in the corner of the restaurant.  You have the feeling that if you don’t eat everything on your plate, she will come over and tell you off.  🙂 The menu there full of traditional Salento dishes. Salento is the stunning region in the “heel of the boot” full of  white-sand beaches, and beautiful ancient towns that still have their medieval walls.

Lecce is a beautiful, mainly pedestrian, wonderfully ornate Baroque town. It was founded when the Greeks lived there, so that means a loooong time ago.  Around the area there are villages in which they still speak a dialect which is very close to ancient Greek.  Amazing that it hasn’t changed over the last thousand-odd years!  I say that the town is “mainly pedestrian” as you still have to watch out for the ubiquitous Fiat Pandas driving down “roads” scarcely wide enough for three people to walk abreast in, but mainly it’s a peaceful place to wander around in.

For ciceri e tria you use fresh tagliatelle made without eggs.  I’m not sure what would happen if you used tagliatelle with eggs, but it may mess up the important part of the dish in which you fry part of the pasta in olive oil until it’s crispy.  I haven’t done a test yet to see what happens if eggs are involved.  If anyone tries it, please let me know how it goes!  Just an aside here: the fried tagliatelle turn into something a little like chips.  Just add a little salt and you have a delicious snack without making the rest of the dish!!

The tagliatelle are easy to make even without a pasta machine and a standing mixer.  You just need a bit of muscle to knead the dough (or someone to do it for you!), and a good rolling pin. I used dried chickpeas to make this, but you could cut the process time a lot and use canned ones.  Just drop the cooking time you need to make the sauce.  Oh, and one more thing about the sauce: go look at the photo at the top of the page, and then remember, it should have MORE broth.  I didn’t leave enough of the broth.  It still tasted good, but it should be almost “soupy”.  Just add more water if the chickpea mixture is drying out while cooking.

Ciceri e tria takes a bit of work to make, but it’s totally worth it!  You can make the sauce the day before to cut down some of the labour on the actual day, and just heat it up again before you throw the pasta on to boil. Be courageous, take the bull by the horns, take the plunge, grab the golden ring, or just forget all those metaphors and go try to make it.  It’s not as tricky as you think! (Oh, actually I don’t know if the golden ring one is actually a saying, but I like the sound of it!).  It’s almost as good as going to Puglia (well, it’s not really but I wanted to make you feel better!).

By Lisa Watson

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Prep Time 2 hours hours

Cook Time 1 hour hour

Total Time 3 hours hours

Servings 4 or 5 people

Ingredients

• 200 g 7oz All-purpose flour
• 200 g 7oz Durum wheat flour
• 1/2 tsp Salt
• 200 ml 4/5 cup Water
• 300 g 2 cups Dried chickpeas
• 1 Onion
• 1 Carrot
• 1 stalk Celery
• 1 medium - large Tomato
• to taste Salt and pepper

Instructions

The night before:

• Put the chickpeas in a large bowl filled with water and leave them to soak overnight.
• On the day:

The Sauce

• Peel the carrot and onion.  Chop them into small pieces. 
• Slice the celery stalk. Chop the tomato.
• Put all the vegetables in a large pot.  Drain the chickpeas and add them as well.  Cover with fresh water.
• Bring the mixture to the boil and scrape off any foam with a spoon.
• Lower the heat and leave to simmer until the chickpeas are tender, but not mushy.  This can take anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour depending on their age.  Stir every so often and check the water level isn't dropping too much.
• Add about 1 tsp of salt in the last few minutes of the cooking.

Eggless Pasta:

• Combine the flours and salt in the standing mixer (or on a clean kitchen benchtop).
• As the flours are being mixed add the water in a steady, slow stream until it becomes incorporated into the mixture (or try to knead the dough by hand and add a steady stream of water at the same time. You may need an assistant for this one!).
• Take the dough out of the standing mixer and continue to knead it by hand for 15 minutes until the dough becomes elastic and smooth.
• Wrap the dough in plastic wrap and leave it to rest for 30 minutes.
• Make tagliatelle with your pasta maker, or roll the dough out with a rolling pin until it is quite thin, then cut it into long narrow strips.
• Sprinkle flour all over the pasta so that it doesn't stick together and leave it on a tray covered with a tea-towel until ready to use.
• Boil a large pot of salted water.  While it is coming to the boil, heat a few Tbsp of olive oil in a frying pan.  Fry about a quarter of the pasta in the oil until it is brown and crispy.  Keep a close eye on it, as it can burn quickly.
• When the water is boiling, add the rest of the pasta to the water and cook for 1 -2 minutes.  Drain it and add it to the chickpea mixture.  Add the fried pasta and mix it all together.
• Now, enjoy it!  you've earned it after all that work!!

This pasta with a sauce of sausage and spinach is another one of those sneaky recipes I use to get yet more spinach into the stomachs of my spinach-phobic children!  With the tomato puree and the sausage, they hardly even notice the green flecks, especially if I grate a mountain of Pecorino cheese over the top……I find it delicious too, so it’s a win-win situation. 🙂

The sauce with sausage and spinach goes incredibly with with Pecorino cheese. Pecorino is a hard cheese made from sheep milk that is used extensively in Tuscany, Umbria and Southern Italy. To be honest, although I’m bordering on a cheese-a-holic, it’s not my favourite kind of cheese as I find it a little too salty, but my kids and husband adore it.  Whenever we go to the beach in Tuscany for our Summer holidays, while I stand despondently at the cheese counter in the supermarket trying to find something which is NOT Pecorino, while the rest of my family are busy throwing as many different kinds as they can into the shopping trolley: fresco (soft and mild), stagionato (old and crumbly), and semi-stagionato, which is somewhere between the two. It also comes with with peppercorns in it, and with peperoncino in it……the choice seems nearly endless!  Luckily in Tuscany the salume (dried meats) are delicious, so I make up for my cheese neglect in other ways….so if you were worried that I may be wasting away from starvation, please stop this minute!

If you’re an adult and actaully enjoy the taste of spinach….at what age does that happen???  How do you go from being a green-things-hating kid to an adult just like that?  Is it that you wake up one morning and decide from now on you’ll eat spinach???  Is it when you buy your first car?  When you get a real job????…..anyway, if you feel adult enough, put the whole leaves in.  It tastes great like that!

To find out how to cook pasta like an Italian does, check out my handy guide.

By Lisa Watson

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Penne Rigate alle Salsicce e Spinaci

Prep Time 15 minutes minutes

Cook Time 10 minutes minutes

Total Time 25 minutes minutes

Servings 4 people

Ingredients

• 400 g -or you can use pasta like fusilli or cellentani penne rigate
• 1 small onion
• 3 sausages
• 450 ml 2 cups passata di pomodoro ( tomato puree)
• 80 g frozen or one bunch of fresh. spinach
• to taste salt
• to grate over the finished product Pecorino stagionato
• 1 tsp crushed optional peperoncini

Instructions

• Boil the pasta as per the packet instructions.
• While waiting for the water to boil, chop the onion finely and sauté it until it becomes translucent.
• Add the sausages crumbled or sliced (depending on how you prefer them), and brown them. If adding peperoncino, you can add it now. (I don't when cooking for my kids, as they start screaming and pawing at their mouths if they eat even a speck of chilli).
• Add the tomato puree, spinach and salt and simmer on a low heat until the pasta is done, stirring occasionally.
• Drain the pasta, add the sauce and stir.
• Grate Pecorino over it and serve immediately.

How to make risotto two ways

As promised, here’s risotto made the traditional way….be eternally grateful to me now, as I only did it this way for you instead of using my pressure cooker. 🙂 This recipe comes from my wonderful mother-in-law who makes this dish far better than I can!  It’s a derivative of a risotto dish called Panissa vercellese, which means that it comes from the province of Vercelli in the Piemonte region in the North-Western part of Italy where they grow Canaroli and Arborio rice.  The original risotto has a special kind of salami in it called salame della duja and lardo in it, but no Parmesan.  Sounds yummy, but it would be MUCH heavier than this version with sausages. Lardo is not exactly a diet food (but, oh man, it’s good on bruschetta!)

My mother-in-law told me that when she was young, they almost never had pasta, but always rice dishes.  Pasta was made fresh and only for special occasions.  My husband’s grandmother used to stand up to her knees in water day in and day out when she was younger, working in the rice fields.  She’s now 95 years old and recently bought 25kg of tomatoes from the market so that she could make and bottle pasta sauce for all the rest of us lazy members of the family…..maybe spending years bent in half and always wet is the secret to a long, healthy life!  If anyone wants to go and ahead and try it, let me know how it goes…..I’m more the drinking-wine-in-the-sun-on-the-terrace kind of person.

It’s all about the quality of the ingredients

The quality of the sausages is very important for this risotto.  If you get flavourless ones, then your risotto will be exactly that. If you can, try to get some from a butcher rather than the supermarket (where we all know that the sausages are made with any leftovers they pick up off the ground…….is that a good way to start a vicious urban legend or what!). If you’re feeling super-cheffy (yes, the spell-check pulled me up on that word, but you know what I mean!), you can soak the beans the night before and boil them in unsalted water for an hour before actually getting on to making the risotto.  Now, if you’re like me, you’ll never remember to do the soaking step, so just buy a can of beans from the supermarket and don’t even pretend that you’re making everything from scratch (actually, that’s directed at me from me….I think I may be going mad! Writing notes to myself in my own blog? HELP!)

What are Borlotti beans and can they be substituted?

This recipe calls for borlotti beans, which I thought that I couldn’t find outside of Italy until I realized that they have a screed of names, but are actually pretty much all the same thing.  This bean has as many aliases as an undercover CIA spy: cranberry beans, and coco rose beans are just two of them. Before cooking, the beans are a beautiful striped pink or red and white, which fades to an ugly uniform mud-brown colour when they’re cooked….shame about that, but they do taste good.  Just don’t get your hopes up that they’re going to make your dish look colourful! If you cannot find borlotti beans, any kind of dried beans will work at a pinch.

This time around, I actually used cannelini beans, which are similar, as that’s what I had on hand.  They work well too.  They are white beans, that stay whitish during cooking, so there are no surprises there! Just don’t use kidney beans….been there, done that, didn’t even want to touch the t-shirt.  Save them for Tex-Mex cooking!

By Lisa Watson

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Risotto with sausage, red wine, and dried beans

Risotto with sausage and borlotti beans is a traditional risotto from the Piedmont region in North-western Italy.

Course entree, first course, Main Course

Cuisine Italian

Prep Time 40 minutes minutes

Cook Time 25 minutes minutes

Total Time 1 hour hour 5 minutes minutes

Servings 4 people

Ingredients

• 1 Onion
• 2-3 Sausages
• 350 g Caneroli or aborio rice 2 cups
• 250 ml Red wine 1 cup
• 1 Beef bouillion cube or beef broth
• 1 tsp Salt or to taste
• 400 g 1 can Borlotti or cannelini beans
• 30 g grated Parmesan cheese 3 Tbsp
• 1 large pot Simmering water or broth

Instructions

• Put the pot of water with the bouillon cube in it to simmer on the stove top.  Chop the onion finely and saute it in olive oil in a second pot. When the onion becomes translucent, crumble the sausage and add it.  Stir the mixture until the sausage is browned.
• Add the rice and saute until it browns slightly.
• Add the wine and let it boil off.
• Pour in enough water/broth from your simmering pot to cover the rice mixture. and put the timer on for 13 minutes.  Now, STAY THERE AND DON'T MOVE!!  As the rice is cooking, watch the level of the water.  As it goes down, add water from the simmering pot, one ladle-full (or cupful) at a time. Stir the rice often.
• At this point, you can drain the beans and add them.
• As the time gets to around 12 minutes, start tasting the rice to see how done it is. The type of rice you have may vary the cooking times, so I'm being conservative here. If it's close to being cooked, don't add any more water and let the water in the rice boil off....and don't forget to stir it.....
• Add the Parmesan cheese and stir it in.