Italy in my kitchen- Delmonte Chifferi Rigati!

Ingredients

The resealable pack is such a relief!

2. Boil rice in 2 cups of water and keep aside.

3. Boil all the chopped vegetables and drain the water.

4. Now we shall prepare the sauces. Pasta is cooked traditionally in red or white sauce. In this dish, we will use both.
Red sauce

-Take a little olive oil and heat it in a pan.

-Add chopped onions and saute till translucent.

-Add blanched tomatoes and garlic paste and cook.

– I add packaged tomato puree easily available at stores for the texture and rich red colour. You may make puree at home if you wish.

-Add oregano,basil and salt and cook till tomatoes are done. Add a little thyme. Use it sparingly as the flavour of thyme can be over-powering.
-In the end,add hot and sour/chilli-tomato sauce. The red sauce is ready.

Rosso is red in Italian!

White sauce

-Melt butter in a pan.

-Add refined flour to it. Mix the two.

-Now add milk while stirring continuously so that lumps are not formed. Add black pepper and salt. Don’t let the sauce thicken too much. If it does,add a little milk.

White? It is Biano in Italian!

5. Now for the vegetables.

-Heat olive oil in a pan. Add sliced onions and saute them.

-Add capsicum to the onions.

-Add the rest of the vegetables. Sprinkle oregano, basil, pepper powder, chilli-flakes and salt.
(My guests were vegetarian. You can experiment with bacon or smoked chicken)

-Add 1 table-spoon each of red and white sauces and mix. Keep this aside as well.

6. Add red sauce to boiled rice and white sauce to the pasta.

Rice in red sauce

Pasta in white sauce

7. Next is the layering. Take a Borosil dish, large enough to accommodate all the ingredients.

-Arrange rice at the bottom.

-Then add the vegetables and make the middle layer.

-Use the pasta for the top layer.

Italy’s flag has three colours-red,white and green and we have them all in this dish.

8. Now grate mozarella cheese over the top layer and sprinkle oregano ,pepper and salt over it.

9. Put the dish in the oven and bake till the cheese melts.

10. Cut bread slices with a cookie cutter. Toast the bread. Take a little butter and add garlic powder to it. Mix it well and apply it on bread. Grate mozarella cheese over the slice and sprinkle oregano,chilli flakes and a little salt. Bake till cheese melts.

11. Ecco!(That is Italian for Voila,in case you were wondering!) The dish is ready! Serve it with home-made garlic bread.

In this particular dish, you get three distinct colours and three distinct flavours. You can relish them one by one or mix them up on your plate. Either way, the experience is amazing!

The recipe turned out really well. Our guests were really nice people and were not only fond of good food but had a lot of knowledge about it too. The lady even shared a very different recipe of lasagna with me. I will post it later, for sure!
They were all praise for the dish and I was overjoyed.
Thank you Delmonte, for the appreciation I received and for the look of pride in my husband’s eyes!

Looks yummy too!

P.S. All you people reading this, do let me know when you try out the recipe. I would love to hear from you and know whether you liked the dish or not and if you wish to add on something to it.
                                                                   Buon Appetito!