Roma pasta

This is a classic Roman pasta dish. Back in the day before the New World, and tomatoes, were discovered, Italians ate their pasta without a heavy marinara.

I read about this a while back, and filed it on my ‘things to try’ list. Cooking dinner tonight, I found my pork chops were bad (just bought them yesterday!) and had to come up with a quick plan B. My “plan B’s” usually involve calling Papa Vitos for a pizza, but I was hungry and didn’t want to wait 45 minutes to eat.

Then I remembered the Roman Pasta story I read in the paper. I googled around for some recipes and then made my take on it. The recipe makes a meal for one, so increase as needed.

Ingredients:

Handful of dried pasta (I use about 1/5 a package of Barilla’s PLUS multigrain angel hair pasta)

2 teaspoons FRESH ground pepper (must be fresh)

Salt to flavor the water (usually I don’t use salt here, but there are so few ingredients, I included it), I put in a couple pinches

One or two pats of butter. Purists don’t use any, some use a light sprinkle of olive oil.

1/3 cup fresh grated Romano cheese (all though I used fresh parm because it’s what I had). If you buy the dry stuff, you really need to stop doing that. Life is too short.

Directions:

Add the salt to the water. Boil the pasta to al dente. DO NOT OVERCOOK! Save about 3 tablespoons of the starch water and return the pasta to the pan after straining. Add the butter, half the pepper, starch water (should still be in the pan) and half the Romano. Toss until everything is well coated.

Serve on a plate, then garnish with remaining pepper and Romano.

That’s it. A great meal in 10 minutes, and one that has been served for over a thousand years.