Hi guys, hope you're well! Okay so today is Monday, I want to do a beautiful special
to really make use of a fantastic Italian greens called cime di rapa.
It's part of the broccoli family. It almost, let me just cut it in half, it almost
looks like a kind of sprouting broccoli and it's the same family. So if you look
in here, look at that. You can see you've got the bud, you've got the stalks and
the leaves and they're all usable and they're all absolutely delicious. So what
I want to do is really bring out the flavour in the cime di rapa. We're
going to do garlic, black olives and we've got some nduja here. Now just
check this out. At James Italian we really do try and work
with some incredible suppliers and we work with an amazing artisan British
cure house called Cobble Lane Cured and they've made nduja for us and it's
incredible. Nduja traditionally comes from Basilicata, or Calabria should I say,
it's absolutely famous. It's kind of like a soft salami with those amazing
Calabrian chilies and spices and it's a real delicacy. People love it. You can
have it on pizzas, you can have it on bruschetta, you can kind of cook seafood
in it, surf and turf, but today we're gonna do it with our broccoli and we're
gonna do a lovely pasta, casarrece. Again another southern
Italian pasta that we make every single day at James Italian. If you have a
little look here it's almost like a little fusilli right and you can see the
little twists and turns that's just gonna aid catching hold of sauce. So it's
gonna be really really good. So we're going to make it super quick so I'm
gonna take a nice handful of our casarrece straight in to our cooker there.
So we're going to cook that for three minutes because it's a fresh pasta, but
cook it according to package instructions if you're gonna do that at
home, and then what I want to do is show you that marriage, that beautiful
marriage, of the garlic, the olives the cime di rapa and what I've done is I've
taken this nduja and I've beaten it up with a fork and I've let it down with
olive oil so it will melt straight away. I'm gonna try and show you here. I've got
a hot pan, the pasta's in. Right we're gonna go in first of all with the nduja
and what's really nice is the minute that you heat that up
it starts to melt and the flavours and the spices they really start to come out.
Can you see how the oil is changing colour? And then to that we can add the
garlic, olives, you get that nice sort of briny seasoning, the broccoli goes in and
then we'll start to just fry that off. You want to put a little bit of colour on to
the garlic. Keep moving it around. It's quite nice you can hear it sort of
crackle. We do not want to get the garlic dark, okay? We want the garlic to remain
lightly golden. So just just fry that off and then you want one nice big spoon of
your passata and I'm gonna use a little bit of that
cooking water, which is really nice just for sort of breaking the frying you know
we let that just sort of almost braise away, just gently gently bring out the
flavours from the olives. You've just had a couple of minutes of just simmering
there, like that, which is beautiful. Pasta's pretty much there.
One of the joys of making pasta every single day in the restaurants is you can
change the shapes, you can flavour the pasta, you know, there's so many
different things you can do with it. So toss it and you want to kind of, you want
to feed that pasta with a little cooking water just to make it elegant and light.
Look at that now all I need to do now is season it with some parmesan. So I'll take a
nice chunk of parmesan, give it a few nice...
Look at that! And I like just to do it on the top like this as the pan just begins
to cool down, and it's just beautiful flavours. So just plate that up. It's dark,
it's rich. You're gonna get the sweetness from the tomatoes, the bitterness from
the cime di rapa, the warmth from the chili, and that lovely seasoning from
the olives. It's a really beautiful comfort food dish. It's on the specials
today, which is very exciting, and then at the table I'll be asking the waiters to
finish with a little parmesan to order, and I hope you really enjoy it. So there
you go casarrece with cime di rapa, nduja, and tomatoes. Special of the day.