Bill Granger's Spaghettini with Prosciutto, Lemon and Chili

I love Bill Granger cookbooks and his style of cooking. His recipes are so fresh and healthy and very simple to make. I ate at his cafe in Surrey Hills, Sydney - his ricotta pancakes with banana and honeycomb butter were sensational!

Anyway, this is what I made for dinner.....


Spaghettini with Lemon, Prosciutto and Chilli

Ingredients:

1/4 cup lemon juice
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
2 small fresh red chillies, seeded and finely chopped
12 slices prosciutto, cut into thin strips
1 Tbsp grated lemon zest
250g rocket leaves, shredded
400g good quality dried thin spaghettini

Method:

1) Whisk the lemon juice, olive oil, chilli and some salt and pepper in a bowl to blend.

2) Put the prosciutto, lemon zest and rocket leaves in a bowl and toss to combine.

3) Bring a large saucepan of salted water to the boil. Add the spaghettini and cook until al dente. Drain and add to the prosciutto, rocket and basil. Pour the dressing over and toss to combine.

4)Transfer to a large serving dish or divide among four bowls. (In this case, it served two very hungry eaters and a very hungry man for lunch..)


I get home at about 6pm every night from a pretty tiring work day. We usually go for a run when I get home and then the race is on to prepare dinner quickly so that I'm not washing dishes and cleaning up at 10pm! I like to cook things with minimal ingredients so that not only is it easy to prepare, it doesn't cost the earth either.

This dish is from 'Bills Food' - Bill Granger's first cookbook. I have all of his books and use them pretty regularly. Brett (my husband) and I like to eat a lot of pasta after our runs and this dish was great!

Not a lot of preparation was required. I love it when there isn't too much chopping involved and in this case, I only needed to chop a couple of chillies up from our garden. My new mother-in-law had recently loaded us up on lemons from her now defunct lemon tree, so it was a good chance to get rid of a few of those!

I also added two chopped tomatoes that I had sitting around and substituted the rocket for baby spinach, as Brett isn't a big fan...

The pasta was able to boil away whilst I cut up the prosciutto. I used fettucini as opposed to spaghettini, as we had an open packet that needed using.

Once the pasta was cooked, everything was tossed through.. too easy! I found that the prosciutto stuck together a bit though I probably should've added it slice by slice.

Mine didn't work out exactly as Bill's looked in the book... No surprises there..

All in all, however, a great success! It was quick to make (no more than 20 mins), contained no tricky ingredients and wasn't an expensive meal to produce. I'll definitely make this one again.