Pasta with Ham, Tomatoes and Olives Recipe

Pasta with Ham, Tomatoes and Olives

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I remember that in my childhood, when we saw an abundance of food only on the pages of the Book of Tasty and Healthy Food, the idea of pasta for us was limited to a pack of egg vermicelli, elbows and shells.

Pasta with ham or pasta carbonara existed only in our fantasies. Of course, next to the popularity of potatoes, pasta could not compete. But still, it was perfectly affordable food.

The main thing then was to keep the pasta from sticking into one big lump while boiling. Very rarely did people complicate their lives by making a sauce. The height of chic was to pour fashionable, hard-to-find Bulgarian ketchup over the pasta, or sprinkle it with grated hard cheese. The word spaghetti we heard, perhaps, only in the film The Adventures of Buratino, and I still remember Duremar’s delight at the sight of a huge dish of spaghetti.

I remember that a few years ago on a fishing trip we boiled a pack of shells and simply mixed them with two cans of excellent pork stew. Many people had hysterics. So did I!

It is customary to call pasta (from the Italian pasta) simply macaroni in everyday speech, regardless of its shape. The pieces of dried dough come in many shapes and sizes, made from wheat flour or rice, buckwheat, legume flour, or just starch. Very often various natural colorings and fillers are added to the dough. Somewhere I read that there is no single classification of pasta, so it is not quite clear how people find their way among the different kinds. Still, it is not difficult.

In the past spaghetti was up to half a meter long. By the way, you can tell the size of a pasta by its name; usually the ending shows it: if the pasta is large, it ends in oni (spaghettoni), if small (or thin), in ini (spaghettini), and if medium, in ette or etti (spaghetti).

Spaghetti comes from Italy, and in Genoa there is even a museum where you can see a notarized deed recognizing pasta as maccheroni. The word spaghetti probably comes from spago, Italian for string. And there are thousands of sauces for spaghetti. Very tasty ones include spaghetti with chicken or pasta carbonara.

Ingredients

2 servings

For the pasta

For the sauce

  • Ham 50 g
  • Garlic 2 cloves
  • Cherry tomatoes 12-15
  • Pitted black olives 12-15
  • Fresh basil 1 sprig
  • Olive oil 4-5 tbsp
  • Salt, black pepper to taste

For sprinkling and garnish

  • Hard aged cheese (Parmesan, Pecorino) 30 g
  • Fresh basil 1 sprig
  • Basil leaves, large olives, cherry tomatoes for garnish

Step-by-step recipe

Pasta

It is hard to call this dish pasta with sauce; it is more of a warm pasta salad. Cooking the pasta and making the sauce go on in parallel.

  1. Put the pasta on to boil. First, put a large pot with 3 l of water on high heat. Water is usually salted when it comes to a boil. The sauce with ham, olives and cheese is a little salty, so I add 15 g of salt (5 g per 1 l of water). Then add the spaghetti and, stirring so it does not stick together, cook for exactly the time recommended on the package. It is important not to salt the water after the pasta has gone in. That way the pasta will be cooked al dente, “to the tooth”, when you feel a barely noticeable firmness in the very center.

    Spaghetti, ham, tomatoes, olives, basil and hard cheese.

Sauce

  1. Flavor the oil with garlic. In a deep frying pan over medium heat, heat the olive oil. Peel the garlic and crush the cloves flat with the side of a knife. Fry the garlic in the oil for 2-3 minutes so that it flavors the oil a little. Then remove the garlic and discard it.

    Fry the garlic in the oil for 2-3 minutes so that it flavors the oil a little.

  2. Fry the ham. Slice the ham as thinly as possible. Ideally, buy ham that is already sliced; then the pasta with ham will turn out uniform. Dry-cured ham such as prosciutto works very well. Cut the meat into strips and fry briefly in the oil over medium heat, just 1-2 minutes.

    Cut the meat into strips and fry briefly in the oil over medium heat, just 1-2 minutes.

  3. Add the tomatoes and olives. Halve the small cherry tomatoes, slice the pitted black olives into rounds or quarters and put them in the pan. Season lightly with salt and freshly ground black pepper. Cook for 2 minutes, stirring.

    Add the halved cherry tomatoes and the pitted black olives cut into rounds or quarters.

  1. Add the basil and simmer. Pull the leaves from one sprig, chop them finely and add them to the pan; this gives the pasta with ham an additional range of flavor. Reduce the heat to the minimum, cover the pan with a lid and let it simmer for a few minutes, until the pasta is cooked.

    Add the basil.

Cheese with basil

  1. Grind the cheese with basil for sprinkling. Pasta with ham is especially good when sprinkled with cheese as well. Grate a piece of good aged hard Italian cheese, such as Parmesan or Pecorino, and transfer it to a chopper (blender). Add the green basil leaves from the second sprig and chop everything to the consistency of coarse grain. The hard bits of cheese hardly change in size, while the basil almost disappears, coating the cheese with a green tinge.

    Prepare the cheese for sprinkling separately.

    The famous Genoese pesto sauce for pasta — pesto alla genovese — is based on exactly this: hard cheese and basil. It also includes pine nuts, garlic and olive oil.

Pasta with the sauce

  1. Drain the spaghetti and mix it with the sauce. Drain the boiled spaghetti in a colander and let the water run off. Try to leave no water, or the pasta with ham will turn out swimming in liquid. Transfer the spaghetti to the pan with the sauce and stir.

    Mix the spaghetti with the prepared sauce and stir.

    It should be noted that this sauce is not as runny as béchamel or the meat sauce for pasta Bolognese. Those sauces suit short shaped pasta better, which holds liquid sauces well thanks to the many hollows on its surface. That is why pasta with ham is made as a warm salad.

Serving

  1. Divide the pasta among plates and sprinkle with cheese. Put the pasta with ham, tomatoes and olives on plates and sprinkle with the prepared hard cheese with basil.

    Put the spaghetti with ham, tomatoes and olives on plates.

    Garnish with basil leaves, large olives and cherry tomatoes. Pasta with ham is a great breakfast.

    Pasta with ham

Calories and macros

830 kcal

Serving ≈ 460 g

  • Protein22 g11% of kcal
  • Fat38 g43% of kcal
  • Carbs94 g47% of kcal

100 g180 kcalProtein 4.7 gFat 8.3 gCarbs 20.4 g

Calculated from the recipe ingredients, excluding salt and spices. Data: USDA and Matvaretabellen.

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