Pasta Puttanesca | The Bad Beginning — A Literary Supper (2024)

For most of the afternoon, Violet, Klaus, and Sunny cooked the puttanesca sauce according to the recipe. Violet roasted the garlic and washed and chopped the anchovies. Klaus peeled the tomatoes and pitted the olives. Sunny banged on a pot with a wooden spoon, singing a rather repetitive song she had written herself. And all three of the children felt less miserable than they had since their arrival at Count Olaf's.
The Bad Beginning (A Series of Unfortunate Events)
Lemony Snicket

The intenseness of the Christmas holidays is finally wearing off and I've found myself with time to actually write up some of these recipes I've had waiting. Working in hospitality is both quite lovely and also so awful around the holiday time, while everyone is in a great mood and customers are delightful, I always find myself working a ridiculous amount - coming home and binging on Netflix and leftovers.So it was quite nice that Netflix released the new season of A Series of Unfortunate Events, it really reminded me that I had quite a few blog posts and recipes piled up on here on draft that had to be finalised and published. And this is one such recipe, probably one of the more notable and memorable foods from the beginning of the dismal series. The Baudelaire Orphans cook Pasta Puttanesca for Count Olaf and his troupe of performers - it maybe didn't go down quite so well with them, however, it is indeed delicious and super easy to make.

*Notes: the chilli is optional depending on whether or not you like a bit of heat. I also omittedanchovies, because I don't eat meat, I don't really think you lose anything by not putting them in, but if you want obviously feel free to put in 3-4 finely chopped anchovies. If you do not have a food processor also - you can simply mix the flours and water together by hand.

Pasta Puttanesca
Ingredients
Pasta(serves just so many, I had pasta for days guys, and no matter how many times I tried to make less it didn’t happen. Or let’s say, 8.)
1 1/2 cups of Tipo 00 flour + extra for dusting
1 cup semolina flour
1 tbsp olive oil
1 - 1 1/2 cups of hot water
Sea salt
Fresh black pepper
Puttanesca Sauce (serves 4)
4 cloves of garlic, sliced finely
2 tbsp capers, drained
1/4 cup black olives, pitted and sliced
5-6 large ripe tomatoes, diced and squished a little
1 red chilli, sliced finely *optional
Handful of roughly chopped flat leaf parsley
1 tbsp olive oil
Fresh black pepper
Sea Salt

Pasta

1. To make the pasta place both flours in a food processor (*see note) and briefly pulse to combine - add in a few cracks of black pepper and about 1/4 teaspoon of sea salt. Turn on food processor again and slowly add in the oil and hot water while running - it will combine slowly until it forms a giant ball of dough.

2. Remove the dough and flatten out as best as possible before cutting into quarters. Cover with a clean towel and leave to sit for 10 - 15 minutes.

3. If you’re planning on cooking straight away, this is a good time to get a large pot of salted water on to the stove to boil.

4. While resting the dough prepare a clean large area with a dusting of flour in preparation of rolling out your pasta. Doing each quarter of the dough at a time, use a rolling pin to roll out the pasta as thin as possible. I made this a few times - and trust me, as thin as possible still ended up being quite thick once cooked - so definitely go overboard in the rolling out of the dough. Having a pasta maker will entirely help with this step.

5. Once rolled out, cut into thin strips of whatever width you particularly feel like, I would recommend hanging the pasta once it’s cut, I just improvised something with a cooling rack, it will just help stop the pasta strands from sticking together. Repeat with the rest of the dough till it’s all done.

6. Cook the noodles a few batches at a time for about 3-5 minutes each and drain and toss amount desired with your puttanesca sauce.

Puttanesca

1. Heat olive oil in a large frying pan, when hot add in diced tomatoes with a pinch of sea salt, making sure to keep them moving in the pan to prevent them burning. Add in olives, capers, chilli and garlic and cook for another minute, mixing them with the tomatoes as best as possible.

2. Remove from heat and season with fresh black pepper, add in the chopped parsley and mix through before serving with your fresh made pasta.