Salt and Woodsmoke

I am, on the whole, a lazy cook. I like stuff that is easy, not too fiddly and that doesn’t eat in to my precious Wire watching time. Erm, I mean precious family time. Pasta with something quickly fried up to go with it, roast veg and brown rice, steak and salad or a bung it all in the pot and let it cook for 6 hours - that’s my kind of cooking.

Pasta, though obviously quick, is something I rarely eat at home as, more often that not, I eat it for lunch at. Being a wholesaler of the great Garofalo (it has purple teeth, nobbly kness, warts on the end of its….etc) and the equally fine Campofilone pastas means that lunch very often involves some radiatori or tagliatelle and a jar of high quality tomato sauce. Oh how far I have moved on since my student days.
Tonight I was feeling guilty about a large bag of (criminally small) smoked cod’s roe that has been sitting in the fridge for a week or more waiting to be used up. And earlier I was prompted by a note in the latest edition of Olive about what do with bottarga, the Mediterranean equivalent. So, I thought fuck it. I’m eating alone tonight I’ll cook up some spaghetti, sizzle some garlic, throw in some chilli and the smoked cod’s roe. A little lemon a scattering of parsley. Hey presto, short, sweet, pukka, lahvely. Taste of the med via the fens.

Recipe (sort of)

Finely chop a clove of garlic. Warm through in some olive oil. Add chilli to taste. Add a dessertspoon of smoked cod’s roe (we smoke ours quite soft). Stir. Cook your spag. Drain and reserve two spoonfuls of the cooking water. Add the cod’s roe mixture with some of the water to the spaghetti. Mix (or toss. Entirely up to you). Add parsley and lemon juice to taste. Shouldn’t need any salt. Maybe a grind of the peppermill. Maybe some more oil to lube things up a little. Et voila. Spaghetti al uova di merluzzo affumicato…..Possibly.

I wrote the above before cooking and eating it. I think I may well change the recipe to use less garlic and maybe to cook the cod’s roe less or not at all. As it was, the true salty fishy smokey flavour was lost a bit behind the chilli. Either way a pretty good dinner.