This dish is a family recipe. It's made of pasta, squid ink sauce, and prawn or imitation elvers. It can be served as an appetizer or starter and is perfect to surprise your guests in any party at home.

Step 1: Ingredients

- X + 5 Lumaconi pasta
- X Prawns
- 5-8 gr Squid ink
- 1/2 Onion
- 1 Lemon slice
- Olive oil
- Salt

X – quantity of filled Lumaconi (5-6 per person)

Another version of this dish is made with imitation elvers instead of prawns. (Picture 4)

Step 2: The Pasta

The pasta recomended for this dish is a shell shaped, Lumaconi (in our case) or big sized tubes (3cm/1.2 inches dried and 5 cm/2 inches boiled).

Boil the X+5 pasta shells adding 1 tbsp salt to the water for as many minutes as the brand recomends. We will use the X shells to fill them with the prawns and the other 5 to thicken the sauce.

The pasta must be "al dente", this means not much soft, we need it not to break while we fill it. After boiling the pasta strain it and put it in a bowl with1 tbsp olive oil and mix it, like this it won't get sticky and will be shiny.

Step 3: The Prawns

It's always better to use fresh products and cook them when we make the dish. There are two pros: they can be easily peeled and you can leave the tail. The products that are already baked are hard to peel or are already peeled with no tail.

The size of the prawn depends on the size of the pasta after boiling. In our case we chose fresh prawns that will turn red after boiling them with 1 tsp salt and a lemon slice. Put the prawns in the boiling water, wait 2-3 minutes till they float on the surface. Strain them, let them cool and inmediatly peel them leaving the tail.

Step 4: The Sauce

The sauce is made of 5 ingredients: 1 onion, 5 Lumaconi, squid ink, salt and olive oil.

Chop the onion and sauté with oil and salt. After this process (the onion should be translucent not brown), add the 5 chopped Lumaconi and the 6-8 grams squid ink. Fry it for 2-3 minutes mixing it all well. If it's too thick add some water to the mixture.

Then, put the sauce in a bowl and purée it using the blender to get a homogenous sauce. If it's too liquid heat it softly to let water evaporate.

Step 5: The Fusion

Put the prawns inside the pasta shells leaving the tail out. Finally fill the remaining space with the sauce.

As all the components of this dish will be cold, heat it in the oven for 5-10 minutes at 50ºC/122ºF (do not heat in the microwave). Serve it decorated as a "bite" and eat it taking it by the tail.