Walnut Sauce with Strozzapreti

This is another quick-fix meal: making the sauce takes no longer than for the water to boil and the pasta to cook. Leftovers can be frozen and warmed up in the oven or a steamer.

I came across strozzapreti in a specialist Italian shop. Like orechietti or the thick fusilli, they are somewhere between fresh and dried pasta, packed with a sell by date like the dried variety but softer and chewier like the fresh stuff. The name is intriguing as it means “priests stranglers”.(and of course, as all the smarta***s will point out, in the picture we have fusilli.)

The walnut sauce was inspired by an Italian recipe but only to the point of two ingredients, walnuts and cream. There is no real intention to make this a traditional Italian sauce, but as the cold spell persists, so does the need for comfort food…

What you need

• 400 g of pasta (ideally fresh, but in any case, high quality stuff!)
• 50 g butter
• 100 g ground walnuts (or pecan for a slightly different but equally palatable flavour)
• 1 medium sized onion finely chopped
• 1-2 pressed cloves of garlic
• 100 ml Marsala
• 100 ml cream
• 200 ml crème fraîche
• seasoning with vegetable stock (powder, possibly dissolved in the Marsala), Cajun spice mix and paprika

What you do

1. Fry the onions in the butter (add the garlic as well unless you want the flavour to be more prominent, in which case add it right at the end) until they are glassy, perhaps slightly golden.
2. Add the ground up walnuts and allow to develop their flavour while stirring.
3. Pour in the marsala and simmer until it seems to have been absorbed by the nuts.
4. Add the cream before stirring in the crème fraîche.
5. Season to taste with vegetable stock, Cajun spice and paprika.

Serve with freshly ground parmesan cheese.