Pasta with Pumpkin and Parma Ham

Welcome in autumn!
I believe that autumn is magic, because you can see how many colors there are within yellow and brown.

 

I love colors,  that's why I don't like using black and white pics, I guess you can use black and white colors just if you need to communicate something sepecific that goes outside of the colors and to underline the subject.

Pictures like the one above without any color loose their meaning, becoming just a melanchonic pics. Colors, instead, give a meaning and a feeling depending from the viewer, for example this picture brings up to my mind a wonderful movie: What Dream May Come, an union of love and colors.

"What's true in our minds is true, whether some people know it or not."

What Dream May Come

Going back to food, today I'd propose the autumn vegetable par excellence : pumpkin!

Do you mind how to prepare pasta with pumpkin, let's try together! 

Ingredients

(2 people)

300 g pumpkin

150 g pasta

100 g Parma Ham

extravergin olive oil

onion

vegetable stock
Pamesan

Vinagre glaze to decorate

Place the pumpkin in a pan, add a bit of water and let boil it. Once ready add the stock and let cook other 10 min. Blend the pumkin to have a cream.

In an other pan, cook the extravergin olive oil with a bit of onion and hot pepper, add the parma ham sliced and cook for 30 sec. Add the pumpkin cream, cook and mix.

Cook the pasta al dente (turn off the burner 3 min in advance) add 3 tablespoon of parmesan cheese and pan-fry.

Now, it's time to eat!

Enjoy!

Pasta with zucchini flowers

What to do if you have: hand-made pasta from your grandmother, San Marzano tomatoes, sausages and zucchini flower?
During the summer in the south of Italy we are used to make the tomato sauce; this is a memory of my childhood when my parents woke up me in the early morning to help them to do the peeled tomato sauce, just because I had little hands usefull to push the tomatoes into the tin.
It's a lot of time we didn't do it, also because living in Milan there no reason to do it, here you can just buy it. It's something about traditions that are going to get lost.

Coming back to us, I received from my parents a lot of good ingredients from my "South", my grandmother makes a delicious pasta thus I decided to make up a new receipe with those fresh "Perini" tomatoes.

How-to:

Fresh Tomato sauce

Ingredients
Tomatoes

Basil


Put the tomatoes in a pot al let them boil until cooked. Let cool down, then peel and blend with basil. 

Pasta (Maccaronara) and Zucchini flowers

Ingredients

Fresh tomato sauce
2 sausages or 100 g minced meat
Onion
Salt
Bread crumbs
1 egg
Parmigiano Regggiano
Extravergin olive oil
Mint leaves
Chilli
10 zucchini flowers
200 g fresh maccaronara


Place in a bowl the sausages/minced meat stuffing and mix with salt, parmigiano,mint, egg and bread crumbs, like you would make a meatball.
Clean the flowers and stuff a bit with this mix, close the flower.
With the remaining meat mix, make little meat ball (you can add a bit more of bread crumbs).
In the meanwhile prepare a pan with extravergin o.o. an onion, chilli, when hot place the meatballs and the stuffed flowers.
Let cook for 15 min moving the pan every once in a while, than add 1/2 of red wine, let evaporate it.

Now add your tomato sauce, add a bit of salt and let cook.

Prepare your pasta et voilà!

Buon appetito!

                                      This recipe takes parte into the Ammodomio contest!
                                        Questa ricetta partecipa ad un anno Ammodomio!