shell.

Boil some water. Put three dried shitake mushrooms in. Measure a plateful of shell pasta – I’m using Lumache 50. Put in pasta when water boils. In the meanwhile, take dried roasted ebi and dried wakame out of the cupboard. Take these out of the fridge: capers, spring onion. Wash spring onion, don’t cut. Take leftover red wine out of the fridge – I’m using Shiraz Merlot.

When pasta boils, pour water out. Get shitake mushrooms out. Leave the pasta in the pan, put back on the burner, and pour a bit of olive oil. Cut little pieces of spring onion with scissors into the pan. Stir-fry pasta and spring onion for a bit before pouring in a good deal of, but not excessive, red wine. Let stir-fried pasta boil in very shallow red wine. The pasta will eventually become brownish.

Quickly take a bit of dried wakame and break it to little pieces into the pan. The idea is to get the wine wet them. Go back to the shitake mushrooms. Cut them small with scissors. The idea is to get all these ingredients into small pieces so that they could be incidentally and randomly contained within the hole of the shell pasta. Put the cut pieces of shitake mushrooms back in the pan. Stir.

Put a teaspoonful of capers in, casually including the water in the spoon, as you would do anyway. Stir again. When ready, put dried ebi. Stir for the last time, put a bit of salt, two pinches of ground black pepper.

Serve.