The Loose Connections Recommender #4

On Making It Easy From Now On

Sometimes life gets hard and you just need the basic things around you to be easy.

1. When I need to feed and be fed in a hurry, I often whip up a bowl of pasta with pesto. Twenty minutes from putting the water on to putting it on the table. The beauty of pesto is that there are so many variations of how to make it, and most of them of are pretty good. I’ve tried it with basil, parsley, rocket, spinach, pine nuts, walnuts, almonds, hazelnuts, macadamia nuts, breadcrumbs, cream, lemon, ricotta, sun-dried tomatoes and with or without cheese. This is my favourite version, but you can substitute any of the above items for their logical counterparts.

All ingredients are tossed in the blender as is (or mortar & pestle if you’re strong armed & old fashioned) - I don’t fry the garlic or the nuts.

So simple, so good, so full of greens. Lemon keeps the pesto bright green and fresh’n’clean tasting. My daughter used to call this Pesto Arresto when she was little and that’s what I still call it in my mind. As in stop everything and just eat it.

Pesto Arresto

2 cups of rocket

1/2 cup basil

1 large garlic clove or 2 small, grated on a parmesan grater (or can be finely chopped also)

3/4 cup pine nuts

I teaspoon of sea salt

I/2 cup olive oil

1 lemon zested, then squeezed

1 cup of frozen baby peas, cooked separately. Green beans would also be good.

I recommend spiral pasta for pesto, but any pasta will work.

Serves 4, or 2 with seconds for lunch the next day, or 1 with lunch for next two days - tastes good cold too.

I combine the al dente pasta and around 1 cup of pesto together in the saucepan - it needs a very generous coating of pesto to truly zing - and then add 1 cup of cooked peas, some extra fresh basil and olive oil and serve with lashings of good parmesan.

I forgot to take photos of mine last night cos I was hungry and tired but I found a similar one online. Mine would have seven to eight times that amount of parmesan on it, even though Italians find it rather sacrilegious to add parmesan to pesto…. I‘m a kitchen rebel.

Now because I am only momentarily pretending to be a recipe blog here, allow me to digress a moment … having being misquoted a few times myself, I’m often quite interested in the origin of quotes attributed to famous people, such as this oft repeated pasta based one purportedly from Sophia Loren:

"Everything you see, I owe to spaghetti."

In the Aug. 11, 1961, issue of LIFE, Dora Jane Hamblin wrote about Sophia Loren: 

“She eats everything in sight, washed down with red wine, and when teased about her appetite narrows her eyes in her best temptress look, swivels her shoulders provocatively and says in a Mae West voice, "Everything you see, I owe to spaghetti."

In 2015, she debunked the quote in a New York Times interview:

Did you actually say the quote frequently attributed to you, "Everything you see I owe to spaghetti"?

Non è vero! It's not true! It's such a silly thing. I owe it to spaghetti, no, no. Completely made up.

Allora! Basta! Next.

2. Sometimes when I sit down I just want to watch something entertaining and interesting, and so many times I end up giving up because I fail to find anything that meets my basic criteria.

‘Mythomaniac’ is a TV show I throughly enjoyed, both seasons of it, with a third one on the way. It’s French, which I love to listen to (although apparently you can watch a dubbed version? Not into that) and it’s pretty wacky but has solid and moving central performances. I could watch the genuine and expressive Marina Hands do anything. In this black comedy, she plays Elvira, an under appreciated and overworked mother and wife who lets a misunderstanding about her health get way out of hand and then suffers the consequences. It’s about truth and lies and secrets and longing and exhaustion and managing complicated situations and family and desire.

Its currently streaming on Netflix in Australia and the US.

3. For my third recommendation today I would like to share with you a playlist I made a while back called ‘Feelin’ Blue’. It’s a very relaxing, ee-aa-sy listening playlist that I play all the time. It has songs by Willie Nelson, Velvet Underground, Sean Nicholas Savage, Marianne Faithfull, Waylon Payne, Lael Neale, Rosie and the Originals, Linda Ronstadt, Bob Dylan, Black Keys, Little Richard and Duke Ellington. I apologise it’s currently available only on Spotify, I’m still getting around to transferring my many many playlists to Apple Music and YouTube but I will as soon as I can.

Wishing y’all a gentle, easy day full of fine food, good entertainment and great music.

Lo x