Italian cuisine in the Maldives

The Maldives are a tourist place frequented by many nationalities and for this reason it is important to try to make all the guests of the resort happy.One of the most popular theme nights is the Italian Dinner .

Making Italian cuisine known around the world has been my prerogative since I started traveling the world more than 20 years ago.

For this reason I decided to take the opportunity to share one of my Italian recipes. 

Directly from the book :

The Black and White “Smile”: Special Edition of The Recipes of My Smile

Spaghetti with seafood

Ingredients:

• 300 g fresh mussels
• 100 g cherry tomatoes
• 160 g Shrimp
• 300 g fresh or frozen baby octopus 
• 200 g of tomato sauce
• Extra virgin olive oil
• Salt and pepper
• Garlic

Method:

Let’s prepare our pan with a little extra virgin olive oil 1 clove of garlic cut in half slightly crushed. Fry the garlic until it reaches a golden color, at this point we add the baby octopus and remove the garlic, sauté for 4-5 minutes until they begin to shrink slightly.

Add the cherry tomatoes cut into wedges and a little white

wine and let the wine evaporate so that the alcohol is no longer present in our recipe.

Then we add the tomato sauce and cover it all, let it cook for about 20 minutes until our baby octopuses are tender and tasty.

In another pan we are going to open the mussels:

in a pan, fry a clove of garlic until golden in color we should smell a sweet garlic scent, at this point add the mussels and cover with a lid and let them cook with their water and with the steam formed with the help of the lid.

 At this point we season with a little fresh parsley and black pepper.

We will add the cooking water obtained from mussels to the baby octopus’ sauce, now add the peeled prawns and let the octopus sauce cook for about 5 minutes together with the water of the freshly opened mussels.

In the meantime, in a pot, we will boil some salted water where we will cook the spaghetti or any other pasta you have at home or simply you like it the most.

For cooking the pasta, it is very important that the water is properly boiling you should be able to see a large waters bubbles, since if it does not boil well enough the pasta could get sick and therefore not be optimal and above all not al dente as we are used to in Italy.

Help yourself with the directions suggested by the package of pasta, once you have considered for example 12 minutes for spaghetti, I suggest you remove them from the pot at 9 maximum 10 minutes and let them finish cooking in the pan with our seafood sauce previously prepared.

For about one or two minutes over moderate heat, in such a way for sauce to penetrate into the pasta itself. This will give our dish an extraordinary taste and very simple to do at the same time.

Mix all very well and add some extra virgin olive oil too.

At this point your pasta is ready to serve on the plate, you can put some of the mussels with shells on for give a nice presentation, but I suggest cleaning the rest, on this way you will a beautiful presentation but also a seafood pasta that is easier to eat.

Buon Appetito