When I told Mr Rathbone that Stanley Tucci had written a food memoir he said, “He could write a book about his slippers and they would publish it.”  As documented in this blog previously, Mr Rathbone is very understanding about my celebrity crush on Yul Brynner, which in recent years has kind of transmogrified into a celebrity crush on Stanley.  What do these two men have in common?!

They have both written cookbooks – hahahah!

Actually, Stanley has written a couple of cookbooks and his latest is a memoir with recipes and I LOVE IT.

As mentioned, myself and my bestie Cathy of Kitchen Confidence have pledged to cook our way through the book.  I nabbed the Negronis and my first cooking challenge was Stanley’s Spaghetti with Lentils. It was GOOD but HUGE. Stanley and his family must have massive appetites as his recipe states serves 4 and we got about 8 portions out of this.

I’m not going to post the recipe here, as I’ll probably be breaking some kind of copyright law and I LOVE Stanley and don’t want to upset him in any way (!) so I’ll just pop up some pix to tempt you to get Taste and cook this up for yourselves.  It was super delicious.

Here’s a fun video of me breaking up the spaghetti

and here are the busted up bits with a Stanley Tucci Negroni (naturally) hovering in the background…

Big pot of spaghetti with lentils

Big pot of Stanley’s marinara sauce (this isn’t in the book but you can find a video of Stanley demonstrating this here – highly entertaining!)

Cathy & I really enjoyed making and eating this dish but I see that I scribbled a note on the recipe, “We would have liked more sauce, we are Brits of course.”  Because although we know in our minds that real Italian food is usually plenty of pasta with a little bit of sauce, we are greedy and like it the other way round.  I served this with some grilled hipsi cabbage in an anchovy sauce. That was delicious too.

The next day, I popped the leftovers (and there were a LOT of leftovers) into a casserole dish after adding the rest of the Stanley Tucci marinara I had made, and topped with cheese and breadcrumbs. I bunged it in the oven covered with foil to heat through, then took the foil off to melt the cheese a bit.

I ate some of this with my friend Lady Jane who came to stay, and sent some home with her in a Tupperware for Trix.  I STILL had plenty left!  This was super tasty and I can’t wait to cook another dish from Stanley’s fab book.  Highly recommended.  He’s the new Vincent Price!

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