It’s such a crappy picture, but it tasted good. My camera woes will hopefully be behind me soon … just waiting for a new lens to arrive next week. In the meantime, more mediocre pictures of food. But I digress.
How many of you have tired or heard of fregola? I’ve seen the name written in several ways: fregola, fregula, and fregole (as it appears on my bag) — sometimes it is merely referred to as Sardinian cous-cous. Fregula is a small ball-shaped, toasted pasta from Sardinia typically cooked in a tomato sauce with seafood.
My mother had a recipe for it last year and we were able to locate the pasta in a gourmet food store. I can’t even remember now what her recipe was … but we used the pasta once. Obviously, it mustn’t have been very good. I’ve had the bag sitting on my shelf ever since and decided to make dinner with it tonight.
The pasta is kinda cute, if pasta can be considered ‘cute’ — little toasted balls that plump up, yet stay firm when cooked. I heated a bit of chicken broth in a pot then added the fregola and cooked for the recommended 8-9 minutes. I plucked out a little ball now and then to check the progress … this isn’t the sort of pasta you can throw against the wall.
I warmed up the remaining meyer lemon confit made earlier in the day. I drained the fregola and drizzled it with the confit, along with a teaspoon of the oil. I added a few sliced grape tomatoes, a chiffonade of fresh basil, and about a dozen small olives to the bowl and tossed it all together. Simple and colorful.
It smelled wonderful and I enjoyed the nutty flavor of the pasta alongside the lemony olive oil and basil. Even though the pasta is pretty hearty, the citrus flavor lightened the dish overall. I still have quite a bit of the dry pasta left, so will experiment further with it. I found a few ideas below.
More fregola ideas from other blogs:
Fregola Sarda
Fregola Sarda with Chicken and Roasted Baby Vegetables
Fregola Sarda with Pesto, Pinjur Topped Toast
Fregola Sarda with Zucchini and Pinenuts
Seafood Soup with Fregola
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Pasta alla Vodka
Poached egg with basil and meyer lemon confit
