Pasta… pasta! you open the fridge and discover the perfectly nice smoked salmon slice, a few minutes past its sell-by date, purchased to be consumed for lunch which never happened – oh I know, those lunchtime meetings, they do get in the way of your weekly food plan, don’t they?
So what to do with the salmon/mushrooms/slightly wilted asparagus when in season?
Pasta!
It’s not the Italian way – and I know what I’m talking about, having lived with a half-Italian for over 15 years: pasta needs to be celebrated with fresh ingredients! They need to be sourced for a pasta dish, not what you have languishing in the fridge! But let’s be honest: which ones of us non-Italians have seen the tired contents of the fridge veg compartment and not thought: pasta! Stick it into fusilli or tagliatelle, use it up before there are wild mushrooms growing in the fridge...
This recipe uses, admittedly, fancy pasta from Carluccio. But to be honest, any good quality linguine will do, even if not sexily stripy pink, yellow and green…