Gramigna "all'amatriciana"

I had some tomatoes from the farmers market and I wanted pasta... I had brought a bag of Gramigna home from Bologna last fall that I still hadn't touched, so I decided to make an "all'amatriciana" like preparation. I boiled the tomatoes for a minute to peel them easily (one plum tomato and one yellow tomato), diced them, and put them in a saute pan where I had been cooking pancetta cubes, diced red chile peppers (that I had frozen - convenient!) and diced garlic in olive oil. Sauteed it all for maybe 10-15 min til it made a sauce. the pasta cooks in 6 minutes. Nice. I took a bit of the pasta water to put in the sauce and then dumped in the pasta. It got super super creamy for some reason, and it was pretty great. Add some parmigiano-reggiano and delicious fast easy pretty authentically italian dinner!

Note the steam still rising up from the bowl......mmmmmmmmmmmm!!!!!

Spaghetti with Garlic, Olive Oil, Red Pepper Flakes, and Olives

This is one of my traditional "go to" dinners when i'm sick of other stuff or in a rush or craving pasta or just too lazy to do something else. While the spaghetti's boiling (I eat about 3oz dried for myself for a filling dinner and don't always use spaghetti but any really good Italian dried pasta), I put some really good olive oil in a nonstick pan big enough to toss the pasta in, roughly chop a couple garlic cloves (I like it garlicky), and sort of warm up the garlic for a minute or two on low heat - I don't want to burn it or kill the garlic flavor.

Toss in some red pepper flakes and the pasta and chop up a few kinds of olives (in this case a mix from the TJ's Greek Olive Medley), toss a bunch of grated cheese on, and boom, hot fresh semi-healthy dinner in about 15 min. Yum. This time I had some fresh parsley around so I added a bit.