Fusilli avellinisi are long pasta shapes with an irregular twist. I buy them from the fruit shop in Sydney Road where they are a couple of dollars cheaper ($3.99) than the supermarkets, not to mention the 'gourmet' food stores ($5.99-$6.20).
It was a hot summer night, fewer of which we have had this season despite the horror-show predictions of the weather obsessives, given the change from El Nino to La Nina or vice versa. Can't ever recall which is which. Moreover, right now we are in the middle of a forty-eight-hour curtain of rain that has dropped on the first act of summer and broken the banks of Merri Creek.
Nevertheless a few nights ago we were on the bay and it was hot and dinner was a large serving platter of fusilli avellinisi served with flat beans.
Also known as romano beans, these flat bean monsters are about eight inches long at their peak. I cut about ten of these into inch-long sections, blanched them with some broccoli florets for a minute and then sauteed them in a large non-stick pan with onion, garlic, a good dash of olive oil and a cupful of grape tomatoes. The tomatoes only have to take on a little of the warmth and oil to enhance their acidic sweetness and they will add immeasurable flavour complexity to the dish. You can slice them in half but I prefer to leave them whole.
Earlier I had picked two tightly-packed cupfuls of basil, which grows in front of your eyes, and blitzed it with a cup of walnuts (having no pine nuts), half a cup of grated parmesan, two chopped cloves of garlic and a generous half cup of olive oil. Salt, of course, and pepper. I read somewhere that you are supposed to make this with a mortar and pestle because it's traditional, but that's like saying you should mow your back lawn with a scythe.
The fusilli had cooked: I drained it and tipped it into the saute pan, giving it a toss or two to combine pasta with 'sauce'. (Alternatively, simply put the pasta on the serving platter and tip the vegetables over.)
Half a cup of chopped parsley and basil (since it had grown an inch since I started) and shaved parmesan finished it off; with crusty bread provided to mop up the flavour-laden oil from the platter, and the pesto in a dish as a condiment to be spooned over the pasta if desired.
Then an evening drive around the southern peninsula to Balnarring Beach, where I sat on the sand in the fading light while the teenagers swam in the water that is always warmer here than in the bay. I gazed a kilometre or so down the concavity of beach to where, in the deepening shadows, a few scattered lights indicated Somers. Long ago I lay on that beach in a heatwave and read the last few apocalyptic pages of The Lord of the Rings. Repeating history exactly half a century later, the seventeen-year-old is heading towards the conclusion of the third book of the trilogy, The Return of the King - in the same Unwin single-volume edition, shown below, that I carted around in 1973.
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