Monday madness

My Mondays are absolutely horrific. On a good day, I'm on campus between 10 and 11 for a lecture, then I have my Monday Mondial (the café on campus) with my coursemate, Jack, before heading home for lunch. Then it's back on to campus for 3, another break at 4, a lecture at 5, and then a meeting for the Erasmus committee from about 6 onwards. On a bad day, I stay at Mondial too long with Jack watching YouTube videos so we end up lunching, and then I head for my 3 o'clock lecture. Today was arguably worse. Replace the morning lecture with selling Krispy Kreme doughnuts for the Erasmus society in the bitter cold between 11 and 1 and having a panic about an assessment at my friend's house between 1 and 2.30 and you've got the day I had today. Coming home and having to think about cooking is, frankly, the only thing I don't look forward to about coming home. The temptation to just order a takeaway or, even worse, not eat anything, is utterly overwhelming. Particularly when it's too cold to run to the shed where the freezer is to grab something that's a quick fix and Mr Sainsbury's isn't coming for another two days.

But today, while standing around in the cold outside the main lecture building on campus, I started chatting to my fellow Erasmus committee member, Olivia, about, of all things, pesto. We were sharing a mutual appreciation for pesto and cheese sandwiches, when suddenly, I remembered a recipe I'd seen on Nigella's most recent TV programme.

Pesto alla genovese

Now obviously, Nigella advocates making your own pesto, and while I have no doubt that this adds something really special to this dish, ultimately, I am a student and the last thing you'll find in my kitchen is a food processor (although I do have a stovetop espresso maker to make the 9am lectures more bearable...).

The most interesting and unusual aspect of this meal is the idea of adding potatoes to the pasta. Well, personally, all I can say is that I am a total convert. It turns fairly typical student fare, pesto pasta, into something that is much more filling and just something a bit different. The potatoes break down beautifully and get all mushy, just bulking up the pasta. Or, at least, I'm sure they would if you put the potato, peeled and diced into approximately 1cm cubes, into the bubbling, salty water about five minutes before you add the pasta. It's not that putting them all in together doesn't work, I can testify to how nice it was, but the potatoes don't break down as much as they would if they'd had a bit more time to boil.

After draining the pasta and mushing down the cooked potatoes a bit, I added a couple of fairly generous teaspoons of ready-made green pesto (thanks, Georgia!) and stirred it through the pan while off the heat, as the saucepan was still quite warm from having been on the hob. One thing I can strongly advocate is keeping a little bit of the starchy water the pasta and potato was cooked in before you drain it, and adding this just after you've put a couple of dollops of pesto into the pan. I'd read in Jamie Oliver's tried-and-tested Jamie's Dinners that this is something I should get into the habit of doing, as when you put it back into the pan, it really helps to coat every bit of pasta with whatever sauce you're using. Again, this is something I've definitely become a convert to, especially with pesto (I can't imagine an even coating really being a massive problem with using a tomato sauce, for instance). When I usually make pesto pasta, I find that the pesto tends to cling to some bits of pasta but I'm left with a couple of totally bare pieces. With this simple trick, the sauce thickened and it really did cover every bit.

I'm definitely a fan of this recipe, it really helps to welly up an already simple and delicious meal. Without doubt, the best part of this recipe is the fact that it really doesn't matter if you've barely got anything in your cupboard, you're bound to have the ingredients for this one. We always seem to have pasta coming out of our ears, I always have a couple of different varieties of potato in the house (blame it on the Irish genes), and Georgia tends to have some pesto in the fridge and she's quite easily convinced to let me nick some - I don't even have to pay her back in Haribo Tangfastics most of the time!

Without much doubt, whenever I'm making pesto pasta without any meat like chicken in it, I'll be adding the potato just to beef up (for want of a better word!) this classic student favourite. Beans on toast be damned, it's pasta alla genovese for the next time I need a quick fix!