Black Pasta

I finally made the black pasta dish from the 400 Appetizers book, and I have to say, this one doesn't disappoint.

First off, I had to order the black pasta, also known as sepia pasta, or squid (or cuttlefish) ink pasta, from the internet, because apparently, it's not a popular item in Glasgow.  I don't know why, this stuff is awesome.  It doesn't taste much different from regular pasta, but it's black, so I'd say it's about twice as cool.  Dry, it looks like this:

I had to order a bunch because they wouldn't send it to me unless I ordered more than £5 worth of stuff, and each package was only £3.50.  As a side note, that's the recipe book open to the recipe on the bottom left of the picture.  I will never make a dish that looks like their pictures.

This recipe is pretty easy: cook the pasta, toss with olive oil and a small, chopped and seeded pepper, and top with ricotta cheese.  They suggest black pasta, but really, this will work with any color pasta you've got.  There's even a side-note in the book suggesting green, red, magenta, or golden brown pasta.

When I finished, it looked like this:

Unfortunately for me, I overcooked the pasta a bit, so my nice long, shine strands broke up into little mushy strands that lost a lot of their luster, but the end result was still surprisingly tasty.  The little bit of red pepper really added a lot to the natural flavor of the pasta.  I was initially unimpressed with ricotta cheese in general, but in this dish, it's perfect.  The whole thing came off really well.  You can see that I garnished this with a couple fresh basil leaves.  This is suggested by the recipe book, but I don't think it's necessary at all.

When I was done, it looked like this:

Now this doesn't mean much, since my plates look like this even when I'm eating something that's not very good. In those cases, I don't post pictures of my empty plate.  The fact that there's a picture of an empty plate is my signal to you that it this was a good dish.