Shrimp for Dinner & Tuna for Lunch

K & S came over for a last-minute dinner last night, and luckily we'd just picked up some beautiful cheese (including a new French goat cheese called Le Maître Seguin, a four-year old Dutch gouda called Pradero, a rich truffle cheese called Sottocenere from the Veneto and our favourite sweet apricot-ringed goat cheese) and a lovely baguette from the Cheeseboard. (Incidentally, their pizza was particularly good yesterday: goat gouda, mozz, roasted tomatoes, zucchini and garlic.)

After the first course, we made a shrimp pasta that was really very good, based loosely on a recipe in the April issue of Gourmet. Here is my version:

Boil water for pasta. Sauté (until just barely cooked) 1 lb. peeled fresh prawns in 3 tbsp. olive oil, a good sprinkling of salt and 6 gloves garlic, squeezed through a press. Remove the prawns with a slotted spoon to a bowl, and add a 15 oz. can of chopped tomatoes and 2 glasses of white wine to the skillet, and reduce to 2/3. Add a tablespoon of dried basil (wish we'd had fresh), 3/4 c. cream and 1-2 tsp. sugar to taste. Cook 1 lb. capellini (al dente); add the prawns to the sauce to reheat; mix the pasta into the sauce in the skillet. We should have served it all with parmigiano, which we had all ready to go, but we forgot! In any case, it was a delicious meal (fruit salad with rose water for dessert).

And I would be remiss if I didn't mention today's lunch, enjoyed with a glass of sour cherry juice out in the garden: cheese toasts with the pièce de résistance: mixed lettuces (well salted) with a can of tuna in olive oil (including all the oil, which makes a superb dressing) and two tbsp. of green tapenade mixed in. This is a salad (without the tapenade) that we started making in Lecchi, years back. You can add anything to the tuna-greens blend: lemon juice is excellent, apples would be tasty, as are tomatoes. . . it has to be my favourite easy summer salad!