We love the innovative pastas, often with locally-sourced-ingredients, produced by Brooklyn’s Sfoglini Pasta Shop, and this beet fusilli was no exception, but, and it’s entirely to their credit, I’ve come to the conclusion that the ‘flavored’ products especially can best be appreciated with a minimum of additions. This also makes them ideal as a quickly-prepared and impactful primo.

Also, butter would probably be good. Yeah, butter.

• eight ounces of Sfoglini beet fusilli with a sauce composed of sliced segments of celery from Foragers and spring onions from Norwich Meadows Farm, a pinch of home-dried golden Habanada chili purchased fresh from Norwich Meadows Farm last year, a very small amount of dried peperoncino Calabresi secchi from Buon Italia, all the ingredients heated in a little olive oil inside a high-sided tin-lined copper pan until softened or they had become aromatic, the pasta then slipped into the pan, stirred with some reserved pasta water until the sauce had emulsified, divided into two shallow bowls, sprinkled with toasted home-made breadcrumbs, scattered with micro arugula from Windfall Farms, a bit more olive oil drizzled inside the bowls around the edges of the pasta
• the wine was a California (Clarksburg) white, Karen Birmingham 2015 Pinot Grigio
• the music was Mozart’s ‘Die Zauberflöte’, in a performance by La Petite Bande, conducted by Sigiswald Kuijken, with soloists Isolde Siebert, Suzie LeBlanc, Christoph Genz, Cornelius Hauptmann, Stephan Genz, Marie Kuijken, Philip Defrancq, and Stephan Schreckenberger