Recipe (sort of): The Opposite of Sunday Lunch

So. How on earth to explain how I came to cook a vegetarian Jamie Oliver dish for Sunday lunch?

It’s been cold and miserable for well over a week now, and if it wasn’t for my fading freckles I’d be forgiven for thinking our week of scorching Spring was but a very pretty, blossom-filled dream. For this reason, well, that and for the love of spending a whole Sunday morning playing in the kitchen, today called a warm and comforting lunch. It happens, however, that our beautifully juicy shoulder of pork was last night sacrificed in the name of trying out our new rotisserie; thus lunch today was to be one (*brace, brace*) without meat.

Though I can only leap to my feet and wholeheartedly applaud Jamie Oliver for all the real genuine actual good he has done for schoolchildren and supermarket promotion around our little planet, I must confess that I find the man deeply, deeply irritating. I will absolutely not watch him come on the television and to this day I honestly have no idea how I came to have to own one of his recipe books. Naturally it irritates me beyond all measure that this tome is filled with fantastic recipes for lipsmackingly good Italian dishes. Everything, but everything I have cooked from "Jamie’s Italy", from the pork chops stuffed with sage and apricot butter to the squashed canellini beans with garlic crostini, has been very straightforward and easy to make; and hearty and full of flavour. And so (with a deep sigh), it was to to this particular book I turned again today.

The shops being shut on Sundays here (which is taking some serious getting used to) I had to some extent planned ahead: I knew that at some stage I wanted to make this Pasta Al Forno Con Pomodori E Mozzarella, and some of the ingredients weren't typical storecupboard fare. In the supermarket part of our John-Lewis-a-like here in Wiesbaden they have an unfathomably large selection of dried pastas; it was there I found my orecchiette. The rest of the ingredients were very simple to find.

This dish is essentially a couple of layers of pasta with lots of mozzarella, parmesan and tomato sauce (simmered a while with some crumbled dried chillis, chopped onion and a couple of cloves of garlic) in between. The crowning glory was a couple of fresh basil leaves from the basil plant on my windowsill; I have kept it alive now for precisely a week which is, without question, a world record.

Anyhow, this absolutely did the trick for a warming and tasty Sunday comfort feed. All things considered though, probably not ideal for a wheat-intolerant girl attempting to knock off the two kilos that have climbed on board since she moved to Germany. Mind you, neither is 4 days in Rome.