Copycat cooking

Didn't Melinda's buttery roast tomato sauce look lovely? And it just so happened I was looking for a use for some cherry tomatoes this week. Cumin, garlic and butter are all storecupboard essentials here, so I was good to go.

But what to serve it with? On a grim night in November, you need proper stodge, and there's little better for that than Spätzle. 

Spätzle, sauce and extremely authentic cheddar.

I've been meaning to write about making Spätzle for months. Ever since we've managed to get flour and eggs in decent quantity again, Spätzle has been a semi-regular staple here. They're a sort of German pasta or dumpling, made from an egg-and-flour dough, and formed into little lumps. They're native to various central European regions, and the name is the Swabian dialect for 'little sparrows'. Because obviously. (I'll have to do the Polish dish named 'little pigeons' too some time.)

There are various ways of making your little lumps of dough: you can do some weird grandmother magic of scraping dough off the end of a wooden board with a knife, you can press them through a sort-of potato ricer contraption, or you can press the dough through a large-holed colander or similar.

It turned out that Liz in the village happens to have a specially-designed Spätzle-making gadget of the third type, which she lent me in the spring. This was so successful that I got a Spätzle maker of my own for my birthday in August.

I'd love to show you the Spätzling in action, but it's not easy to photograph a wet dough going through a colander-type-thing over a pan of boiling water if you only have two hands. So here's a video I found earlier:

I can't lie -- it does create a fair amount of washing up. But it's not quite as fiddly and faffsome as it seems some how, and the results are very worth it.

The pasta sauce worked very nicely stirred through and browned with some cheese under the grill.