Pasta with pumpkin and speck

Pasta secca con zucca e lo speck

Ingredients 4 persons

200-350 grams of mezze maniche rigate or other hearty pasta

200-300 grams of yellow squash

some oil

80-100 grams of schwarzwalder schinken (or Speck in Italian) 80-100 grams Robiola (may be substituted with Chèvre or Ricotta)

Oven

Hand blender

🕐 10🔪25🍳 40⏱️ 👩🏼‍🍳👩🏼‍🍳

1. Preheat the oven to 190 degrees.

2. Cut the pumpkin into pieces (without peeling) and place the pieces in a baking dish in the oven and drizzle olive oil over them. Let this bake for 15 minutes.

3. Fry the pieces of speck (or schwarzwalder schinken) in a frying pan until crispy. Then drain them on kitchen paper to keep them crispy. Do not remove the fat from the pan, but rather leave it in.

4. Scrape the cooked squash from the skin, place in a bowl and puree with a hand blender. 5. Meanwhile, in a large saucepan, bring plenty of water to a boil for the pasta. Cook the pasta al dente.

6. Heat the fat again a bit and add the pumpkin puree. Stir well. Add some cooking liquid from the pasta, if necessary. 7. Chop the pieces of speck (schinken) very finely.

8. Drain the pasta and stir into the pumpkin puree. Then turn off the heat and stir in the Robiola (or an alternative) so that the cheese is fully incorporated. 9. Serve the pasta on warmed (rinse briefly under the hot tap and dry) plates and crumble the speck on top.

👉🏽 So you can also make a vegetarian version of this if you crumble vegetarian smoked ham on top.

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Nice to know: In Italy, in the village where we live, there is a small store: the Bottega di Montenero. It is important that this little grocery store stay there so that everyone can get groceries quickly. Especially for the elderly in the village, it is a lifeline because that is where everyone comes together. To modernize things, they created an Instagram page where they occasionally share recipes. This recipe they shared in pumpkin time. It is really delicious. Are you curious? Then go to la_bottega_di_montenero on instagram.

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