01.09.08: Spelt tagliatelle with roquefort sauce

Fancy-pants pasta land, here we come: We snapped up some handcrafted spelt tagliatelle from Spitalfields yesterday, and while we were standing there, the stallholder slipped us each a fateful smudge of intensely creamy, pungent roquefort cheese. Slightly dizzy, we forked over a little more dosh than we meant to in order to take home a chunk of the heavenly blue.

And tonite, She paired up the pasta and cheese, adding dabs of yoghurt and splashes of white wine for good measure to make a sauce that also coated some shallots, chestnut mushrooms, peas, and spinach. Pinches of dill and grindings of black pepper topped it off. Standing by: salad of pear, radishes, beetroot, watercress, spinach and rocket.

HE SAYS: I was a little disappointed the roquefort didn't make the sauce creamier but the taste was great: intensely blue cheesy and salty. Ahh, the power of cheese. The spelt pasta also had a uniquely tasty tang, more earthy then your regular white flour pasta. The salad rocked, 'nuf said.

SHE SAYS: Well, it wasn't bad at all, but that whole dense slice of richness disappeared into a dun-coloured soup. I was trying not to load any more big fat into the dish, so instead of adding cream for thickening, I tried yoghurt - and it totally soupified. Could have stirred in some flour, but that would have cancelled out the bloat-busting good of the spelt pasta (and would have made us feel stooopid paying more for a special-grain noodle).

Spinach was the star in terms of pasta veg, and black pepper heightened the roque-y flavour - a good tip for next time we get seduced by speshy cheese, when the only added accompaniment will be a (spelt?) cracker.