I stumbled on this recipe on the website of food writer Faith Willinger, who was recommended by Mario Batali on the Babbo restaurant website as a good source of intelligence on Italian food and restaurants.
I ended up falling in love with her website's little reminiscings about life in Italy, where's she's lived for close to three decades. And the one recipe she gives on her site is for "garbage pail pasta." I'm not sure if this is a commonly used title for this dish—the only thing it makes me think of is "garbage sandwich" or "garbage plate" or "garbage salad," wherein garbage refers to whatever leftovers are in the fridge and the the latter word the form those leftovers take before going down the hatch.
Who knows. Maybe because it's a pasta you could easily make with pantry goods lying around (it reminds me of pasta puttanesca in this way). But it's a really pleasant dish, with a mix of toasted nuts playing off the sweetness of the raisins—together giving it this sort of foraged feel—and the piquancy of chopped olives and capers. In the adaptation I've doubled the tomatoes but otherwise wouldn't change a thing.
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