Tuesday 5 November - Tuoni e Lampo

This is a current favourite of ours - chickpeas and pasta basically, but with lots of yummy things added.

I started by soaking the chickpeas overnight, and then they were left to cook all day in the slow cooker - this does smell dreadful, but takes the stress out of cooking them! I always cook double and freeze the ones I don't need.

The recipe I base this on uses tinned tomatoes, but I have a freezer full of home made passata from our summer tomatoes, so I used some of this instead.

  

To start, finely chopped celery (bleugh), onions, carrots and garlic were fried, along with some chopped pancetta. Sometimes I use fennel instead of celery - depending on what I have in the house.

 Then to this the passata was added, along with the cooked chick peas and a bouquet garni, and it was all left to simmer for an hour or so.

While this was cooking I made some bread, quite a wet dough, spread out and studded with olives.

Once the chick peas were tender in went the pasta- I like very fine pasta in this recipe, so small macaroni, or this fabulous pasta I found in Waitrose 

 

The pasta was cooked in the sauce for about 15 minutes - slightly longer than if cooked in water - and then the final touch - olive oil that had been gently heated with rosemary, chopped garlic and dried chillies was poured into the chick pea and pasta stew.

 

The stew was served in large bowls, with loads of parmesan sprinkled over it.

and of course, lots of olive bread to mop up the sauce.