A delicious and cheap meal, with a delightful range of textures and tastes.
Preparation: 20 minutes – it’s not as complicated as it sounds!
- Olive oil
- Conchigle (pasta shells)
For the sauce:
- Butter
- Plain flour
- Skimmed milk
- 150g Gruyere or Gorgonzola cheese (depending on your tastes)
- Walnuts – the fresher the better – halved
- A handful of button mushrooms
- Fresh garlic
In a saucepan, bring some lightly salted water to the boil. While the water is boiling, grate 150g of the cheese and set it aside. You might want to substitute the Gruyere for Gorgonzola, but don’t use Cheddar – save that for a tasty Ploughman’s lunch with pickled onions, fresh bread and a pint of foaming nut-brown ale!
By the time the cheese has all been grated, the water will have boiled, so add to the pan a drizzle of olive oil (this will stop the pasta sticking together) and drop in four handfuls of conchigle. Any pasta will do, but conchigle (pasta shells) seem to hold the sauce quite well. The pasta will probably take about ten minutes to cook, during which time you will need to make the walnut sauce.
Now in another saucepan, you will need to melt three tablespoons of butter. Melt it slowly – you don’t want it burning – and then add three tablespoons of flour. Stir quickly, until there are no lumps, then add half a glass of skimmed milk. Keep stirring, because the mixture will go lumpy again quite quickly.
After a few moments the mixture will thicken again, so add another half glass of milk and repeat the procedure until you have a smooth white sauce – not too thick and not too runny. You’ll probably end up using about two or three glasses of milk.
Now add a little freshly milled pepper, then add the cheese and return the mixture to the heat, stirring all the while to maintain a smooth consistency. Stir in a handful of halved walnuts and set aside.
Now take a piece of pasta from the pan, and taste it to make sure it’s not undercooked. If it’s “al dente” (“to the bite”) then remove it from the heat and allow it to finish cooking in the hot water.
Nearly there… in a frying pan take some more olive oil and some sliced button mushrooms. Cook gently for a minute or two, adding a little chopped fresh garlic near the end.
Add the mushrooms to the cheese and walnut sauce, and stir before draining the pasta and pouring the sauce over it. For a contrasting texture, serve with wild rocket and proper Italian breadsticks (the ones that don’t have the name of the supermarket on the box.) French lager seems to go well with this meal, bizarrely.