After a disastrous attempt to create an Eastern European-inspired pasta dish on a czarist purple theme (the opal basil was more grey than purple and the purple string beans turned green the moment they hit the hot water for blanching) I discovered that Hungary actually has a traditional pasta dish. Made with egg noodles, poppyseeds, and crumbled sweet cheese, it's reminiscent of kugel; I decided to keep the flavour profile savoury to let the nutty crunch of the poppyseeds really shine. <br /> <br />I served this pasta with just a little butter melted with some pasta cooking water as a side dish alongside grilled flank steak and a green vegetable. I think it'd also be nice as a main: I’m picturing perhaps a little sour cream and extra poppyseeds stirred into the simple butter sauce and a poached or fried egg crowning the heap. <br /> <br />Some technical notes: I used durum flour (which is just semolina flour, finely ground), traditional in pasta-making and fairly available, but Jamie Oliver, whose pasta recipe and method I used as a loose guide, actually recommends bread flour. I always forget that pasta is far less fussy to make than I think it’s going to be, particularly with a stand mixer and a pasta machine doing all the hard work. My one caveat: Don’t feel the need to roll your pasta to the thinnest setting on the machine. You want your strand pasta to have body, so you may only need to roll it down three or four settings from the initial, thickest one.

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