This is the meal which I cooked for dinner last Wednesday night, it was very tasty, although not a terribly sensible choice given the fact that the weather was very warm here that day. It would be a perfect winter warmer I think. It should serve 4.

2 tablespoons olive oil
1 onion, sliced
250g / 8oz chorizo sausage, sliced
425g / 14oz tin chopped tomatoes
1/2 cup dry white wine
1/2 – 1 teaspoon chopped chilli
12 oz pasta
garnish with chopped herbs and cheese

Fry the onion in the olive oil until tender
Add the sausage to the fried onion and stir together, cook for 2-3 minutes. Add the tinned tomatoes, wine and chilli and season with salt and pepper.
Bring to the boil and then simmer for 15-20 minutes.

Meanwhile cook the pasta until al dente. Drain it and return it to the pan. Add the sauce to the pasta and stir well.
Serve and sprinkle the top with herbs and cheese.

This is the original recipe but as ever I changed it a bit. I had some chilli cheese which needed to be used up. I think it was just a sort of cheddar cheese which had a lot of chopped chilli added into it.

Frankly it was so fiery it left me gasping but I hate food to be wasted so decided that I could use it up in this pasta dish, obviously substituting the chilli cheese for the chopped chilli which the recipe called for.

I think I added about 6oz of the chilli cheese.

It probably seems a bit strange but our ‘boys’ have always been big pasta fans and they have always wanted a mixture of different pasta shapes in the same meal.

Don’t ask me why, I’ve never been able to understand it because to me pasta is pasta and it tastes the same no matter what shape it is.

I didn’t want to open some good wine just to cook with, so for the first time in about a hundred years I bought a box of wine just for cooking. I had been assured that boxes of wine have improved greatly over the years. Sadly the wine turned out to be very dry indeed, in fact it is what we in Scotland would describe as wersh.

The chilli flavour was so overpowering in my version of this recipe that we couldn’t detect any wine flavour at all, but it was still a very nice meal.