Frutti di mare
Submitted by Scientastic
Linguine nere ai frutti di mare
In Italy, a fish course isn’t traditionally separate from the entrée, and the Italian I had helping me to translate all of the names was deeply confused by my insistence that no five course meal is complete without a separate fish course.
This was a simple and delicious way to enjoy some amazing pasta.
Ingredients
- 4 cloves garlic
- 3 red chillies
- 1 glass of dry white wine
- 500g dried squid ink linguine
- 24 black mussels (in this case, precooked were all I could get hold of)
- 16 prawns, shelled and deveined
- 8 scallops, quartered
- 300g squid, cut into rings
- 100g parsley, finely chopped
- 2 tin chopped tomatoes, sieved to remove most of the juice
Method
To begin with, squeeze the tentacles out of the squid, cut off the brains and cut the body into rings.
Then cut the roe from the scallops and quarter them.
The rest of the cookery is so quick that you should cook the pasta before going any further. Once it’s cooked, toss in a little oil and set aside. Finely slice the chillies and mince the garlic and sauté in a pan.
Add the wine and reduce for a couple of minutes. Then add in all the seafood.
After three minutes of cooking, remove from the heat immediately and stir in the squid ink pasta.
This was by a long way the best part of the meal. It was fun to cook and everyone loved it. Every plate was empty.
Even the fussy eater, who had never eaten mussels before and hated squid ate everything on his plate. Well, he didn’t eat the tentacles, but everyone else fought over them, with the usual childish distraction techniques working rather better than they should on a twenty five year old man. Possibly this had something to do with the red wine used to calm the chilli heat of the dish.
