Strozzapreti – Priest Stranglers

Disclaimer: No Priests were strangled in the making of this recipe... I also still hate the Celtics despite the head to toe green outfit.

I have been spending most of my free daytime hours at the Marrickville library using the free Wi-Fi and applying for jobs. The library is great but the job hunt has been fruitless at this point. After I finish my self imposed quota of 10 – 20 job applications I reward myself with scouring the library’s collection of cookbooks. It is rare that I actually follow a recipe but one jumped out at me from David Rocco’s “Made in Italy”. David is a fellow Canadian that has split his time between Toronto and Italyshowcasing rustic Italian dishes.

The recipe is a twist on the standard pasta recipe that yields pasta with a little extra kick and an even better story. The story behind the name Strozzapreti – Priest Stranglers is that these poor Italian housewives were diligently running their households when the local priest would drop by looking to spread the word and fill their bellies at the same time. The housewives would whip up some pasta putting a kink in the noodles hoping the unwitting Priest would choke on it. It seems a little complicated to try to off a Priest with pasta but I guess I’ve never really considered it. I’ve only included the pasta part of the recipe and made changes from my experience. The recipe is for 6 servings and is accurate, we fed five but Jess tossed a plate of finished pasta on the floor before we started cooking.

 

Ingredients:

-          3.5 cups all purpose flour

-          3 canned peeled plum tomatoes, finely chopped, with juices

-          1 egg

-          Salt

Directions:

The big difference between this recipe and any other pasta recipe is substituting the tomatoes for water or egg. Pretty much just mix the ingredients together and knead the dough until it is smooth and elastic. Wrap the dough ball in cling wrap and let sit for 30min at room temperature. Roll out the dough and cut into whatever size you’d like. David’s recipe says to cut to 1cm wide and 5cm long. I find the easiest way to cut dough into noodles is to roll it up and then cut it. We cut ours into a multitude of different sizes and dusted in flour so that they would not stick together. Cook for 4 min in boiling heavily salted water. I unfortunately do not have a picture of the finished cooked product because we ate it before I thought to grab the camera… sometimes it is a good thing to just enjoy something than to get it on film. The pasta is delicious and you taste the tang of the tomatoes. The only way I could see anyone choking would be simply because of the quantity you try to ingest in one fork full.