World Pasta Day with Grana Padano
With people cooking at home more than ever, Grana Padano teamed up with the Italian Supper Club to create the ultimate fresh pasta delivery for International Pasta Day (25th October).
A pretty box made its way to us so that we had a full on pasta weekend for the occasion, after the cookalong with chef Mazzei.
The Italian Supper Club
The Italian Supper Club are a catering and private event company who love to bring the best, highest quality and tastiest Italian flavours to beautiful places, encouraging truly shared experiences of food and wine with new people; they started up in 2011.
The pasta box
The box contained two pasta making kits, with the pasta itself already made, and the ingredients to make the dressing and the filling in the case of ravioli. The kit also including a ravioli cutter and a microplane to grate the Grana.
Tagliatelle
I decided to make one dish a day and started with the tagliatelle with courgette and mint pesto. I love using courgettes in pasta recipes but I had never tried using them ‘raw’ so this was an interesting first for me.
The courgette is blended with the basil, mint, pine nuts, evo, Grana Padano. There is no garlic in this version which suits me fine as I hate when raw garlic becomes too overpowering as it’s often the case). I thought the result was superb. Creamy and really flavoursome, it worked a treat with the fresh tagliatelle, with extra Grana Padano grated on top, of course.
Ravioli
On the sunday, I made ravioli. First I made the filling, simple but delicious made with pan sauteed button mushrooms, garlic (I did add it to the pan and then removed it) and lots of Grana Padano Riserva, blended.
I also made the ravioli but unfortunately the pasta sheets were slightly dry by sunday so I ended up cutting off quite an amout of it (making maltagliati for the next day in the process!).
The ravioli were then garnished in a simple but flavour packed sauteed radicchio with spring onions, which I truly loved: the bitterness of the radicchio went really well with the earthy filling.
World Pasta Day is gone for this year but pasta is good every day: it is the Mediterranean Diet after all!
Below the pesto recipe, which I invite everyone to try out!
Tagliatelle with courgette and mint pesto and Grana Padano PDO
- 400g fresh tagliatelle
- 100g Grana Padano 9-16 months
- 100g extra virgin olive oil
- 1 large courgette
- 40g pine nuts
- 1 bunch fresh basil
- a few leaves of fresh mint
- Salt & pepper to taste
Chop the courgette and add to a blender with pine nuts, salt, pepper, basil, mint, the grated Grana and the evo, and blend to a smooth, creamy consistency.
Boil the pasta in salted water al dente, then drain and dress with the pesto; add more grated Grana and a few fresh leaves of basil and serve immediately.
