Garum angel hair with spinach calamari fritto and red pepper pesto
Recipe by Allahu Snackbar Wikified by Drimble Wedge
Okay, this is broken down into a few things. Here's the overview of it. Take notes, there's a test later!
Got all that! Put it in a bowl and hit it with a hammer. That's how you make my dish! Ta-da!!!
Kidding, kidding.
Contents
Pesto sauce
- One large red bell pepper
- Two teaspoons olive oil (I used an oil impregnated with garlic and mushrooms)
- Teaspoon of dried oregano
- Teaspoon of dried basil
- Teaspoon of fresh rosemary leaves, chopped
- Cracked black pepper (maybe half teaspoon?)
- Pinch of kosher salt
- Handful of pine nuts
- Two teaspoons tahini
- 1/4 Roma tomato
Cut your pepper in half lengthwise, and lay in a pyrex or similar baking dish. See the seeds inside? We hate seeds! Yank them out and throw them across the kitchen with rage. Make sure you clean out any stowaways too. Now, along the inner flesh of both halves, spread your olive oil, herbs, salt and pepper. You have something that probably looks like this:
Preheat your oven to 450 and slap that sucker in for about 15-20 minutes, or until the skin on the bottoms starts to brown and pucker a bit.
While that's happening, grab your pinenuts and put them in a skillet on medium heat without any oil. Roll them around a bit until you get a good bit of browning on them:
Shouldn't take long at all, and once they start to darken up a little, take the skillet off heat and put them in a dish.
Have a beer. Relax. Maybe do some dishes. You can also take this opportunity to make the spinach batter for the calamari fritto.
Spinach Batter
Easy peasy, here's what you need:
- About a half cup of gluten free rice flour (add more to adjust consistency)
- About half a cup of water (keep this conservative)
- Big huge wad of baby spinach. (About two good fistfuls.)
- Two pinches of kosher salt
- Teaspoon of baking powder
- Half teaspoon cracked black pepper
- About a dozen calamari rings (give or take)
- Oil for frying (I use canola)
Okay, zip your spinach in a processor. I mean really go to town on it. You'll probably want to add a little of that water to the spinach so that you can keep the blades spinning and really get that stuff reduced into nearly a paste.
