Prawn and Tuna Linguine

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Prawn and tuna linguine from @jamieoliver Jamie Cooks Italy. Recipe asks for waaay too much white wine vinegar. Very fiddly and would have been tasty otherwise.

A post shared by Matt Tuckey (@matttuckey) on Jan 19, 2020 at 11:12am PST

Well, it's taken about a year and a half but I finally opened Jamie Cooks Italy, The Jamie Oliver cookbook released to coincide with his TV series of the same name. I bought it at a signing in 2018, and it's been on the shelf waiting to be opened ever since. The hardest part of cooking, I find, is summoning the will to buy the ingredients and lay them all out. The cooking of it, once started, isn't that painful. So I picked out the Prawn and Tuna Linguine.

Tesco's deli counter will charge you the same for a little pot, whether it's got a few products in or it's stuffed to the brim, so I got loads more anchovies than was called for. Not sure if this altered the flavour. Tesco only have salted pistachios; the recipe asked for unsalted.

To grind up the pistachios I was supposed to use a pestle and mortar, which I used to have- dunno if a family member has it. But I used my juicer to chop them up, and that worked fine.

The recipe asked for pecarino rind: The pecarino Tesco offered was rindless. Then I left it next to the hob and melted part of it. It's supposed to be a cold, hard cheese. FFS. Added to this problem was the state of my kitchen cupboard, which had started to resemble Newt's hideout in Aliens: stuff everywhere. Looking for the little grater (which is about the height of your little finger, designed for small shavings) took some time.

Now, you might be wondering why cooking posts are tagged 'psychology Saturday.' When you have memory difficulties, any multi-step task is going to be a challenge. The more steps there are the more opportunity there is to mess something up along the way. And, as you can't remember exactly what happened, there's no explanation for the mistake. Hence, I have no clue why I bought a beef tomato. I must have read it somewhere and put it on the shopping list, but it definitely isn't in this recipe. Did I swap from another recipe to this at the planning stage? 'Beef tomato' isn't even in the book's index. I'd never even heard of one.

I invited the parents around to eat it. Immediately, the taste of white wine vinegar overpowered everything else. The recipe asks for 4 tablespoons' worth. It's way too much. It also asks you to put the prawns in too early, so they were a little overcooked. Without those misdirections it could have been a tasty meal.

I fancy having another go at one of the Italy recipes. I love Italian food and would love to visit Sicily one day.