Seafood and cold cuts are a great, great pairing
ingredients for 4 servings (cost about 7 € pp)
- Salt
- 500 g fresh pasta without eggs
- 8 shrimps
- 4 artichokes
- 2 slices speck or prosciutto
- EV olive oil
- 4-6 dried tomatoes
- 4 garlic cloves
- Black pepper
- Chopped parsley
I love combining cold cuts with seafood. Especially shrimps. The classic shrimp-bacon skewer is a characteristic example and a guide to cook them.
Artichokes, on the other hand, are excellent with both of these ingredients, so when I have found some at my favourite market I started thinking how to prepare them.
So first of all we must prepare the fresh pasta and the artichokes. You already know that we have a very analytic article on fresh pasta, so read here how to prepare the maltagliati dough. We also have learnt how to peel and elaborate the artichoke, just click here if you don´t remember how. After completing these tasks we soak the dried tomatoes in lukewarm water.
We bring a pot with salted water to boil and we cook the shrimps for 2 minutes. We remove them and we add the artichokes. We lower the temperature to medium and we boil them for about 10 minutes, till tender. We peel the shrimps and we keep all aside.
Meanwhile in a cold pan we put the speck (or other cold cut). We bring to gentle heat till the speck becomes crispy. We remove it, we add some oil and we pass the artichokes and the shrimps for some seconds, just to brown them and concentrate their aromas.
We remove them and we add the garlic cloves, cut in slices, adding some more oil, if required. We subfry the garlic till golden and we add the dried tomatoes and the speck, cut in small pieces.
Maltagliatti are the most easy to make fresh pasta shape. Its name means “badly cut”, so you understand that is something that has not a strict form. Usually they are triangles or squares or triangles and squares or stripes, or whatever we want!!!!! The only thing that we have to take care is that maltagliati have the same thickness, in order to be boiled uniformly. So with a pizza cutter, we cut it in triangles or squares, or stripes
We reheat the water and we add the maltagliati. We cook them for a couple of minutes. We strain them and we carry them in the pan with the garlic, the tomato and the speck. We also add the artichokes and the chopped parsley. We start to mantecare them with some boiling water and some more oil.
We put the pasta on plates, we add two shrimps on top, we garnish with black pepper and we serve.
