FREEZER CLEAN-OUT DELICIOUS PASTA RECIPE

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade they say.  What would be a good proverb for when one has to clear out a freezer?

This was the ‘picture’ of my freezer on Saturday afternoon, November 11th 2017.  The invasion of ice.  Too much scruffy looking plastic.  Stuffed to the icy gills.

 

Time to give in to the urge and get on with the purge.

It was then that I decided that our dinner that evening would be scraps of the freezer clean-out.  I won’t bore you with the entire menu but there is one recipe that I would love to share with you and is the reason for this blog post.

Visiting Canadian friends invited us to spend a weekend with them in Tuscany at the end of September.  The house they had rented was near Castello di Ama and within easy driving distance of Greve, where we went to have lunch the day after we arrived. On the Sunday, our last day, the charming owners of the house put on a cooking class for us.  The lesson began with the dessert, a tiramisu.

This was followed  by grilled vegetables and tomatoes seasoned with herbs growing in their gorgeous garden.  And then the very Tuscan “pappa al pomodoro” (best pappa al pomodoro of my life!).  On the grill the equally Tuscanissimo Fiorentina steak, together with sausages and fresh bacon strips.  And not last, because it figured just after the pappa al pomodoro,  and most definitely not least, was an un-Tuscan pasta dish consisting of … wait for it … sausages and mascarpone.  Served with plenty of grated parmesan.  Three ingredients only, full of meat fat and dairy fat, and incredibly delicious!  Being dealt a double whammy of mascarpone in the course of one meal had us almost in hysterics … it was just so good and, amazingly, we managed to digest it all!

The photos speak for themselves.

It was a wee bit cold but there was no way we were going to forgo eating al fresco. What a great lunch!

And this is what I rustled up after purging my freezer last Saturday … only as it happened, I didn’t have enough marscarpone and so had to add some defrosted gorgonzola to the mix to make do.  Call this the gorgonzola version.

Well worth making, I promise you. Give it a try!