Tonight, I decided to make Jamie Oliver's "Effortlessly Elegant Pasta" from his new book "Together" and it was another reminder of what a dick Jamie Oliver is.
The chances are, you're aware of his "15 minute meals" (which take about 30 minutes to make), his "30 minute meals" (which take about 60 minutes to make) and his "5 ingredients" (which don't include the additional ingredients that he uses).
This particular recipe, has "750g of fresh lasagne sheets" as one of the ingredients. Now, as you can see from the picture above, it looks more like tagliatelle or fettuccini so to avoid the annoyance of having to cut up lasagne sheets, I bought tagliatelle.
Also in the ingredients, it says "50g whole blanched almonds". Notice that he was specific with the "whole" and not "flaked" or "ground". So I bought some whole blanched almonds.
So, lasagne sheets and a history of Jamie being a dick put to one side for a moment, why has this recipe annoyed me so?
Pound up the almonds in a pestle and mortar...
That's right. Jamie wants us to turn our whole almonds into ground almonds.
He's such a dick.
haha made me laugh. My kid loved those quick meals where he hides the long processes and also whips out of nowhere really exotic and expensive ingredients!
Tonight I made my own concoction - a carbonara with gorgonzola, with some sausages as not enough bacon - bootifool!!
Mind you, looks like that pasta dropped from a great height, landed on the plate and died.
Ha ha - did you notice that I didn't take a photo of the final product and decided to search Google instead? It looked like the-baby-gorilla had vomited over some pasta.
Your carbonara sounds amazing. Pretty much any dish containing sausages and bacon is a winner in my eyes!
the-mrs-gorilla asked me earlier today why we keep cooking Jamie's recipes when we always end up calling him a dick. Fortunately, they always taste good even if they take twice as long as they should, need more ingredients than he lists and involves some long-winded activity that a shop sells (e.g. ground almonds!)
I'm about to embark on another of Jamie's recipes from the same book. Some sort of breadcrumb coated pesto chicken. I make this one quite a lot so I'm optimistic that this other one will be good. I might even take a photo and share it if it doesn't look like more vomit or anything else a baby produces!
I didn't search that deeply. I was surprised that was posted as an "appetizing" final product.
Actually you did give me an idea to add ground almonds or sesame (which we have) to the next carbonara.
Jamie's picture looks amazing compared to what it really looks like!
I find that adding nuts to many pasta dishes help - gives it a bit of "bite" which might otherwise be missing. Toasted Pine nuts is a favourite of mine 🙂
Yeah! It looks like a beached squid! The original source looks even worse!