Maggie Beer's Pasta with Broccolini, Bacon, Goats Curd and Toasted Breadcrumbs.

What I had planned to make for dinner tonight was not what I actually cooked for dinner. I was rather disappointed to be honest. 

When you crave meatballs in a spicy sauce over hot pasta on a cold rainy night and you go to the supermarket with meal plan and shopping list in hand and there is no beef mince, that carefully written shopping list goes out the window. Run out of beef mince!? are you kidding me?? the only time I plan my meals and I'm stuck, lost in the fridge isle with a boyfriend calling me annoying because I'm taking too long staring blankly at the empty section where the mince is normally kept. 

I had to improvise. Quick smart. We were both hungry and impatient with everyone else hovering in the cold section looking for the beef mince too, trolleys too heavy to move out of the way quick enough for our liking. All domestic hell was about the break out in the fridge section of the supermarket if I didn't jump with two feet over this hurdle.

Thank-goodness for modern technology and apps. I quickly zip out my iphone and go straight to my newest app and the one I have been excited to use but not found a chance to make anything from yet (hence the purpose of my blog). 'The best of Maggie Beer' . I knew we felt like pasta so the Pasta with broccolini, Bacon, Goats curd and Toasted breadcrumbs was an easy choice. Quickly back tracking into the veggie section and grabbing some broccoli (unfortunately there was no broccolini so plain jane broccoli was going to have to do) and scribbling the remainder of the ingredients on my now scarred shopping list, we were off again with a vengeance.

Home after nearly biting each others heads off, I headed straight for the kitchen and started on dinner. 

This recipe calls for stale wood-fired bread crumbs. For good reasons you can't buy stale bread at the supermarket although all these trendy recipes asking for stale bread it might just be a hole in the market no one has ventured into yet. Bread doesn't last that long with us or we use modern technology and freeze it. So how does one turn fresh bread into stale bread then into bread crumbs? well I gave it a go.

I sliced half the load of sourdough up into cubes and toasted them in the oven for 10 min then let them cool. Blitzed them in a processor (which the cat proceeded to act like we were murdering his ear drums) and viola... breadcrumbs! These were then toasted in the oven again with olive oil, lemon zest and chopped parsley.

It was a simple dish. Fry the bacon, lightly boil the broccoli, cube the goats curd, cook the pasta till al dente then toss it all together adding olive oil, salt and lemon juice. But... yes there is a but... I think I had high expectations or maybe it was the fact that I had lost my craving for dinner when my finely tuned shopping list went off the rails and hunger got the better of me in the supermarket...it needed a little tweaking... who knows, maybe if my bread was stale and I had used broccolini I would be raving on about it. Definitely more parsley, more lemon juice and crumble the goats cheese so that its evenly spread throughout next time. It was all in all quite delicious but still not spicy meatballs...