Fresh, hand-rolled rigatoni with a cheese and parsley sauce.

I walked into Duikelman to buy a speculaas plate. The mold to make the Dutch windmill cookies that are known throughout the world. Now it’s always dangerous to walk into Duikelman. If you like cooking, it’s pretty close to what heaven must look like. So far it’s been utterly impossible for me to go in there and just browse around and leave the shop empty handed. I always find something I want.

I walked into Duikelman with a misshion. The mold I promised Giulia. However, I stumbled upon this little plate which lead me to a new adventure in pasta making.

A little stick and a ribbed piece of wood can be exciting to a fresh pasta enthusiast.

The description of the plate said it was for making gnocchi or rigatoni. The plate itself is used to make the little ribs that hold the sauce extra well. For gnocchi a lot of people just use the tines of a fork, but rolling them over this plate is the other option. The plate came with the little stick, a stick you can use to roll a sheet of pasta around to make hollow pasta, or maccheroni, such as penne. Rigatoni is a hollow pasta, not unlike penne, with ribs. And that’s where the full use of this simple little thing comes in. You roll small sheets of pasta around the stick on the plate and when you press it together to close the hollow tube, the outside is ribbed and  the final outcome’s name is rigatoni.

Hand rolled rigatoni, waiting to be cooked.

I saw the plate at Duikelman and the crazy cook inside me decided this was something I needed to try. It would be fun. And fun it was. Albeit a lot of work – taking much, much more time than fresh tagliatelle, spaghetti or capelli d’angelo – it resulted in yet another great tasting home-made pasta dish, that just looked a little different.

Rolling a sheet of fresh pasta.

I decided to pair the fresh rigatoni with a very simple cheese and parsley sauce. A basic white sauce with two kinds of cheese, so fresh cracked pepper and some parsley from the garden. It was delicious.

Cutting sheets of fresh pasta to roll into rigatoni.

I doubt I’ll be making rigatoni very often, or for more than two or three people, as it is a lot of work. But I will make it again and I can see it being a fun activity for a cooking club or with kids. It’s much like playing with play-dough, only tastier!

Rolling rigatoni, fresh pasta is always a treat!

Oh, and as a side note, Laurens shot this picture of me while I was working on the pasta. This is why you need to wear aprons and might avoid wearing black clothes when your hands are filled with flour.

Since we moved to our new home, I started my little urban vegetable garden patch. I planted various sorts of tomatoes, bell and spicy peppers, eggplant, artichoke and zucchini. The zucchini and the tomatoes have since grown into a jungle and while the tomatoes are growing steadily, but are still green, the zucchini plants have started to supply us with a steady crop.

When the first zucchini started growing, I knew I had to try “fior di zucca”, zucchini flowers. We researched which ones we should pick and when to pick them and ended up picking just 2 male zucchini flowers. (Had I known then that we would be hit by massive rain and no sun, I wouldn’t have done that, because removing those blossoms, and not giving them the chance to pollinate more females, has definitely hurt out crop. That said, I’m still harvesting more zucchini than we can eat, so it’s not really a problem.)

I had researched a multitude of recipes for zucchini flowers, but ended up choosing to go the simplest way and just batter them lightly and fry them in olive oil. I made a very thin batter of flour, salt and water and covered the zucchini blossoms in it. I fried them and we ate them. They were wonderful. Delicate, meaty flowers, beautiful light texture and taste. I liked them.

Laurens wasn’t convinced though. He liked them, but seemed to recall that the fior di zucca that his nonna made when he was a kid had a thicker batter. He was convinced they could be improved and suggested adding egg the next time.

A week or two later we had friends come over for dinner. Since it was kind or a spur of the moment, last-minute-after-we’d-already-gotten-our-groceries thing, I had no options to make an extravagant feast. I decided on simple stuffed shells, made with ricotta, spinach and leftover chicken and figured that would fill us right up. When we went into the yard however, I did see a couple of zucchini flowers that had done their pollinator duties. So I picked them and a couple of baby zucchini and decided that would be an appetizer.

This second time around I made a thicker batter with an egg, a good amount of flour, salt, a little fresh cracked pepper and a couple of drops of water to make it liquid enough to coat the entire flower. I decided that indeed ‘Fritta è buona anche una ciabatta’ and sliced the baby zucchini into disks which I coated in the batter and fried as well.

The verdict: Wonderful!

Laurens was very pleased, this was exactly the way he recollected them from when Nonna made them in Tuscany. Our guests, who’d never had fior di zucca before enjoyed the delicacy and I was happy I cracked the code.

There are millions of options with fior di zucca. Stuffing them before frying (with endless options of stuffings), not frying them at all, using them in baking, eating them raw in a salad. And who knows. As our crop keeps growing, I might try more options. For now I’ll stick with the Laurens-approved version. Because Nonna’s Nonna was right, Fritta è buona anche una ciabatta!