Today we pay our small tribute to Italian cuisine. We bring you a recipe to make pasta that transports our senses to Parma, the Italian region from which two products arrive that will surely sound familiar: Parma ham and the popular Parmesan cheese.
What we propose is to create a quick and simple dish, perfect for a weekday meal. It's a pasta dish that we make with tagliatelle, but you can use whichever type of pasta you prefer, and we pair it with peas, leeks, ham and Parmesan.
Preparing everything will take you 10 minutes, plus about 25 minutes of cooking gives you a complete, healthy, tasty and very quick-to-serve dish. Perfetto!
Le Creuset deep nonstick skillet and Le Creuset wooden mills
Ingredients (for 8 servings)
- 500 g of tagliatelle pasta
- 2 tablespoons of olive oil
- 2 to 4 leeks, thinly sliced
- 4 to 6 garlic cloves, sliced
- 350 g of frozen peas
- ½ lemon, zest and juice
- Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
To serve
- Parmesan cheese
- Parma ham, thinly sliced*
- Pea shoots or fresh mint
- Chili-infused oil (see notes)
*You can substitute it with jamón ibérico.
Instructions
- In a pot, place the pasta in boiling salted water until al dente. When it's ready, we drain the pasta and reserve the cooking water.
- In the same pot and with the reserved water, we can cook the peas for a few minutes, until they soften a bit (but it's nice if they remain firm).
- In the Le Creuset deep nonstick skillet (in our case we use the 28cm one) add 2 tablespoons of olive oil. Add the sliced leeks and garlic and fry over low-medium heat until they soften.
- Add the peas and the zest and the juice of half a lemon. Then we season with salt and pepper to taste and add the pasta.
- Mix well, grate the Parmesan cheese on top, arrange the Parma ham slices, the pea shoots or fresh mint and drizzle with a splash of chili-infused oil.
Notes
- You can use pre-grated Parmesan, but honestly grating it at the moment is well worth it for the freshness and flavor of freshly grated cheese. For that, you know there's nothing like the Zester.
- Regarding the final drizzle of oil, what we're looking for is an intense flavor accent that contrasts with and enhances the taste of the dish. You can use garlic-infused oil, which always goes so well with pasta, or the typical pizza oil, which is essentially oil infused with chili or peppers. If you don't have it, you can make it at home: in a small oil cruet add some garlic, pepper and dried peppers or chili, and cover with extra virgin olive oil. Leave for at least three weeks for the oil to become infused.
- I can't finish the recipe without recommending you to serve the pasta with a Bérard fork and spoon Set: you'll preserve the skillet's nonstick surface and enjoy the pleasure of serving with a beautiful olive wood utensil.
