Dolcellata and Walnut Sauce

Food blogging isn’t all about the glamour. When you spend most evenings in the kitchen, you inevitably create quite a lot of mess and, even if you are as anal as I am about tidying up as you go along and cleaning everything up once dinner is finished, you still need to do the occasional deep-clean. Well, you don’t have to of course but I come from a household where the radiator covers are removed from the walls each week and cleaned behind so it’s kind of ingrained.

Today was the day so, armed with my Marigolds and all manner of cleaning products, I scrubbed our kitchen from top to bottom. It took ages and there was a fair amount of moaning as I went along but I was glad to have done it; when I finally sat down and looked at the results of my hard work I realised I didn’t have anything planned for dinner though. Not only was I exhausted but I really didn’t want to make everything dirty again.

Luckily, I remembered the cartons of Charlie Bigham’s Dolcellata and Walnut Sauce that were included in our goodie bags on Monday. Boiling some pasta and heating some sauce seemed easy relatively mess-free so that’s what we had. Except I wish we hadn’t. The sauce was bland and lacking any real flavour at all, it would have made a reasonable bechamel sauce but was useless as a sauce it’s own right. I quickly retrieved the leftover chilli from the freezer and had those instead which is what I should have done in the first place. That would have only been one pot to wash too.