Pasta puttanesca

I told you that I was going to work my way through Miss Dahl's Voluptuous Delights. Well here's dish number three, Pasta puttanesca. Her recipe is based on the classical Italian dish Spaghetti alla puttanesca, literally "whore spaghetti" invented in the 1950's. It's just the tasty, tangy, red tomatoey (if that's a word) spaghetti sauce that the name conjures up.

There are a number of stories about how the name came about for this dish which you can read about here on wikipedia if you like, along with the classic recipe. It includes all my favourite pasta sauce ingredients of olive oil, garlic, chilli, tomatoes, basil, crushed black pepper, olives along with tasty anchovies that remove the need for any salt. The only variation to this recipe in Miss Dahl's version is the substitution of parsley for basil. Which I have to admit I didn't do this time, but purely because I didn't have any. I have seen recipes for both versions before.

This is just the kind of simple pasta sauce that I love to make and reminds me of the one we had up in the chestnut lodge. Uncomplicated but full of flavour.....mmm........Still got to make the pear and ginger muffins...just need to get a few more ingredients. Hopefully that will be recipe number four.

Excuse the black and white photograph.....you may have noticed that I'm going through a little bit of a monochrome phase at the moment...