Felicini in Manchester

This is a new post plugging a restaurant or a pub (or something on the menu of said pub or restaurant), a tradition which I had started last June. I usually do it on Friday evenings. I have mentioned the restaurant before. If you ever spend time in Manchester, try Felicini. It's an Italian restaurant and Italian gastronomy is my favorite. I ate there only once. It might not be the greatest restaurant, but I enjoyed the pasta dish I had enough to be inspired to make something similar at home. And it's really close to the International Anthony Burgess Foundation. These are enough reasons to plug it... Again.

Next time, I might plug something from Montreal.

Pseudo Italian pasta and sausages

This picture at the top left was taken at Felicini in Manchester, an Italian restaurant which was recommended to me by one of the people of the ABF. It was my meal, penne pasta in a sausages and olives sauce. Buried in Parmesan, as you can see, I always bury pasta with cheese, unless it is macaroni and cheese, in which case I just have it like that. Before I go further, I wanted to quickly plug Felicini: they were professional and very efficient, serving me within and hour because I had to see a play. And the meal was delicious. It was quite nice and it inspired me to cook my own variation of this dish, which I did last weekend.

You can see the picture of said dish at the bottom right. I used British sausages, heavily garlic flavored.I bought them in a local artisanal food shop. The owner gave me a few advices about making the sauce: no more garlic as the sausages already had plenty, and a bit of balsamic vinegar. I cut the sausages in small bits, fried them, then added a tin of tomatoes. I added a tea spoon of sugar to get rid of the acidity of the tomatoes and poured a generous drop of balsamic vinegar. No olives, no onions or anything like this. Only tomatoes, sausages and of course the Parmesan on top of it all. I drank a Sicilian red wine with it. It was not authentic Italian gastronomy, but it was fairly close.