An indefinable dinner pasta with salame

Ok, first, this dish works. But I've given up naming it.

This is a pasta dish, but I never heard of Italians cooking pasta in a curry-based sauce. Well, look at the finished product and judge for yourself:

The shiny bits in the plate, that's sardine. For a beverage, I went with an ice slush margarita in a wine glass (sorry, host doesn't have margarita glasses).

So, what's going on here? Well, I bought a Daniele Foods salame, labeled 'salame with wine.' Daniele Foods is in Pascoag, R.I.

What do we always do with salame? We put it in a sandwich. And maybe I should have stuck with that, but my experimenting went well beyond ditching the slices of rye.

I opened a bag of spiral pasta and spread out enough of it in a 10-inch sauce pan to completely cover the bottom (no second layer).

I chopped up a similar amount of fresh green beans and one carrot, and put in just enough water to submerge the contents of the saucepan. Turn on the heat and bring to boil.

While we're waiting for the water to boil, I chop up about half the salame and open one can of sardines packed in tomato sauce.

Back to the saucepan, sprinkle in a lot of curry powder, enough to create a powdery ochre sheet on top of the water. Now sprinkle in basil, shake it in almost as much as you did the curry.

In a cup, add a little water, enough to dissolved two tablespoons of starch, whisk and add that to the saucepan. Sprinkle in salt to taste.

After the pasta and vegetables have boiled for 10 minutes, add the salame and sardines. You don't want them cooking more than two or three minutes, just enough to heat them and diffuse some of their flavor into your contents.

By now, most of the water should have boiled out and you have everything saturated a thin curry and basil sauce.

This serves three people. It has a mild, savory taste. There is not enough fish in the saucepan to overpower it; in fact, the fish portion was very mild tasting. This salame is a little bland, but cut into quarter chunks, you have  pieces sizable enough that you can at least appreciate the taste.

One last note, notice I never mentioned hot peppers. I usually throw in some spicy seasoning, but I wanted to try this without any to see if it worked. It did.

Buen provecho!