Rigatoni with Courgette
Rigatoni with courgette is a quick and easy pasta dish and perfect for summer, when we want to spend the least time possible labouring over a hot stove. We like to make this to share with others. In Puglia mealtimes are often social occasions, with family and friends gathered around the Puglia Kitchen table. Food is as much about the conviviality as it is the eating. Rigatoni with courgette is perfect served up from a big pasta bowl for people to help themselves.
We like to serve ours with a tomato salad with torn mozzarella and parsley.
For this you will need:
- 500g rigatoni
- 500g courgettes
- 70g pine nuts
- 2 garlic cloves, peeled and crushed (press them hard using the side of a knife)
- extra virgin olive oil
- grated pecorino
- flat leaf parsley, chopped
- salt
- pepper
Serves 4. You can use spaghetti instead for spaghetti alle zucchine, but we find this fiddly to eat, with the courgette sliding off the strings of spaghetti. We prefer to use a pasta shape that roughly matches the length of the courgette slices. However Rachel Roddy has a recipe that fixes that by adding pasta liquor and reducing so that the courgette cooks and collapses to become a sauce, helping it stick to the spaghetti.
Cook the rigatoni in plenty of boiling salted water. Be generous with the amount of salt. As a rule of thumb we use 1 litre of water per 100g of dried pasta, with 10g of coarse salt or 5g of table salt.
Trim the courgettes, wash them in cold running water, then dry and cut them into fairly thin rounds of uniform size. Wash, dry and finely chop the parsley. Lightly crush the garlic.
Add the olive oil to a wide frying pan, enough to cover its base sufficiently. Sautée the garlic, without browning it, add the courgettes, pine nuts and salt and pepper to taste. Brown for about 3-4 minutes, stirring with a wooden spoon.
Drain the pasta when al dente and toss with the courgettes. Sauté for two minutes, then transfer to a serving dish and sprinkle extremely generously with grated pecorino. Garnish with parsley.
