Meatless Monday Courgette and Haricot pasta

This filling and veg packed pasta dish is really satisfying and moreish.  You don't HAVE to serve it on a Monday, obviously!

Ingredients :

1 medium to large onion

3 large courgettes

1 can of beans (haricot, borlotti, cannelini etc)

400g pasta twists or similar shapes of your prference

salt and pepper to taste.

1 tsp mixed herbs

1 tsp Marigold

red chilli flakes to taste

grated cheese if desired, or Engevita flakes

double cream if you want or have it, or Oatly cream.

Method:

Finely slice the onion and fry in a good glug of olive oil, on a medium heat.  

Cut the courgettes lengthwise and slice thinly - I'll admit I used a food processor for this and it was a boon.  Once the onions are soft and starting to mellow, tip in the courgettes and stir well to coat.  Turn the heat up and keep stirring for a few minutes.  

Add the salt and pepper, mixed herbs and chilli flakes and keep stirring and mixing.  Lower the heat very slightly, and allow to soften and cook down.

Boil the water for the pasta, salt the water once it's boiling, and then cook the pasta for 10 minutes.

Once the courgettes are softer, sprinkle in the Marigold powder and add a little of the water from the can of beans.  Mix well.  Drain the rest of the can and add the beans to the courgettes.  Mix thoroughly, lower the heat and cover.

When the pasta is done, drain it and add it to the courgette mixture.  Stir well to mix, and add the cheese or Engevita flakes.  Finally add the cream if using.

courgette and bacon pasta

Well, we are a nation in a very different place than the last time I blogged.

Covid-19, lockdown, social distancing, queues for entering supermarkets, supply shortages. No pasta, no toilet paper, no flour, no eggs, no ketchup, no tinned tomatoes... Strict limits on purchases of the above if you CAN find them, as well as on hand-wash and hand sanitiser.

I'm lucky that I've always been a bit of a hoarder, and I like to buy in bulk anyway, and also I'm lucky enough to have a fantastically well-stocked local corner shop - so I can get a lot of basics practically on my doorstep when I need them.  Including pasta!

This dish was quick and simple, and veg packed and frugal.  Everyone enjoyed it, including Papa who is usually very mistrustful of courgettes.

I used:

2 courgettes
1 medium onion
125g bacon
one teaspoon of butter
half a teaspoon of salt
half a teaspoon of coarsely ground black pepper
one teaspoon Marigold powder
splash of white wine if you have it, otherwise just splash in some water
50-75g plain cream cheese

400g pasta 
grated cheese to serve


First I chopped up about half a pack of unsmoked back bacon from the corner shop and dry-fried it until golden.  This is the point that Papa filled a large pan with water and put it on to boil for the pasta.  We used 400g of mixed fusilli - half wholewheat and half tricolori, basically because wholewheat is a bit more filling so goes further and the tricolori is interesting and also its what I found in big bags in Sainsbury's a few weeks ago.

Next I topped and tailed and halved and quartered 2 courgettes lengthways and then sliced the quarters up thinly.  They weren't at their best, but this didn't really matter.  I then halved the onion and sliced one half very thinly and chopped the other half finely.

Once the bacon was nicely golden, I removed it from the pan with a slotted spoon, and tipped in the courgettes.  I left it to brown slightly and soften, and then added the onion and the butter and sprinkled in the salt.  I turned the heat down slightly and left it to soften.

Meanwhile, at some point the water came to the boil, and so Papa put the pasta on to cook around when I was taking the bacon out.  Papa asked me if the sauce would take as long as the pasta, and I wasn't sure, but both were done around the same time in the end!

Once the veggies were nice and soft, I added the Marigold powder and the splash of wine.  Honestly, water would be fine, or cider, or dry sherry if you happen to have it!

Once the pasta was cooked, I put the bacon back into the pan with the courgettes and also a ladleful of the pasta water.  Finally, I stirred the cream cheese into the courgettes and bacon.

Tiny had at least 2 helpings, not-so Littl'Un loved it, not-really BigUn enjoyed it too and added it to her plan of things to cook at Uni....

more on no-drain pasta - in which leftover chicken is utilised

As I've mentioned before, I have an issue with draining pasta.  This is partly due to the fact that I have problems with my wrists and hands, and lifting and tipping a full pan of water is painful and uncomfortable for me.  But partly I just don't like doing it.  It feels slow and wasteful and somehow just annoys me.

So when I stumbled across this method for cooking pasta in 4 minutes in the Instant Pot (IP) with minimal water - like an absorption method of cooking pasta - I HAD to try it!  And it is fantastic! Admittedly I probably spend as much time using a slotted spoon to scoop out the pasta as I used to do waiting for water to boil etc, but somehow this just makes me less stressed and irritated than the standard method, and that can only be a good thing! In the future I may use this method to cook the pasta in the IP when I can then just stir something directly into the pot and then serve straight out - cream cheese and smoked salmon/ham springs to mind...

Anyway, I started by letting Tiny choose a pack of bow tie pasta from the corner shop, and we used the whole 500g pack in one go.  This gave us PLENTY of pasta - after cooking, I filled a locknlock box with cooked pasta which was a nice quick and easy lunch for Tiny on the weekend - and the rest served 4 of us generously with another couple of lunches.

As the recipe in the link says, we added about 4 cups of water to the IP, so the pasta was just about covered, maybe a few corners poking up here and there.

I then set the IP to cook for 4 minutes on manual.  I had added boiling water so this went even more quickly than normal.

Once the pot has cooked the pasta for the 4 minutes and beeps that it is finished, switch it off immediately and perform a quick release.

Remove the pasta with a slotted spoon and if required box some up for another day.

I then fried some chopped onions and garlic in a little oil straight in the pan I'd just taken the pasta out of, and then I added a chopped up chicken breast left over from a very frugal Lidl roast chicken supper we'd had recently.  Then I added a bag of prepared cauliflower and broccoli florets which I'd bought in Lidl, along with the obvious spoon of Marigold, and a good squirt of mild mustard.  I finally chucked the cooked pasta back in, and stirred through some soured cream which we'd opened for the not-so-chilli recently.

The result was completely delicious and moreish.  The chicken was not dry, the veg was still slightly crunchy, the creamy but tangy sauce was very comforting and the whole meal was filling and satisfying!  The kids all devoured it hungrily, and the 2 little ones both asked for seconds!  Big'Un and I ate it drizzled with Frank's Buffalo Wings hot sauce, and the little ones even had a taste that way too, and really enjoyed the added flavour.  And when I went to put the leftovers into a tupperware, and I picked a box that was slightly too small, Godpapa was more than happy to just eat up what wouldn't fit, straight from the pan!

One pan hob tomato pasta

This came about because I *hate* draining pasta.

I have no idea why, but everyone in my family knows it.

I've made a few one pan, bake in oven type pasta bakes, but I wanted something quicker and less house heating and less gas guzzling.

Google helped me with a few thoughts, and then I conjured up this:

Fry chopped onion and garlic until soft and add mixed herbs if desired. Add a carton of passata, flavoured if liked, and a carton full of boiling water. I also added half a bottle of Cirio passata but I'm not so sure it was needed to be honest.

Bring to boil and stir in 350-400g dry pasta. Bring back to boil and simmer, covered, for 20 mins. Stir once in a while.

Flavour with Marigold (obvs) and season to taste.

Just before serving, stir in half to a full pot of mascarpone and 2-3tbsp balsamic vinegar. Finally add a teaspoon of brown sugar.

Serve sprinkled with grated cheddar or parmesan if preferred.

Every child loved this. Hurrah!

crackers-on-top lazy pasta bake

I still hadn't quite got my menu-planning mojo working the next day, and also hadn't made it to the shops yet, so i decided to see what we could find locally to make into a meal.  We are very lucky that on the way home from school there is a really nice Greek shop with a deli counter, fresh meat, and fresh bread and pastries.

I asked Littl'Un if she had any suggestions of what she'd like to eat, mainly because she's been going through a phase of not being interested in meals, and taking forever to eat a tiny portion.  I hoped that getting her to suggest something would give her more encouragement to eat better.  She remembered that we had opened a pack of crackers at the weekend, only to find they were all crushed, and she had suggested we could use them as a crunchy topping for a pasta bake.  People who know me will be aware that for some reason, I have an aversion to boiling and draining pasta, so I wondered if I could again adapt Gill Holcombe's brilliant "chuck it all in" pasta bake recipe.

We bought a small pack of happy pork mince, a jar of passata, and a little pot of lovely thick Greek yoghurt at the Greek shop, and then I set to work.

I fried the mince in the much loved oven-proof dish.  Once browned, I then flavoured it with some fennel seeds.  Once the heady aniseed sweetness was apparent, I added some garlic too.  Once that was soft and mellow, I poured in the passata with some stock, and then stirred in the weighed out amount of dry pasta for the family.  This all then came back to the boil quite quickly, and I stirred in the pot of yoghurt.  Littl'Un was in charge of scrunching the broken crackers, in this case a rather battered pack of black pepper and cheddar Ryvita thins, and spreading them on top, and I sprinkled a scant handful of grated cheese on top for extra scrummyness.

I popped this in the oven at 200 degrees and left it for 40 minutes.  After this time, the pasta was cooked, and the top was brown and crisp, and the meat and sauce had made a gooey unctuous filling.

We served this up with some nice green veggies on the side, and everyone thoroughly enjoyed it! And Littl'Un was the first to finish her plateful, AND she asked for seconds too!!

Meatball pasta bake

I often get a pack of meatballs in one of the 3for£10 deals but as the family appetites have increased, a pack of 12 really doesn't go very far! One day a week I feed only myself and the 3 kids but even then 3 meatballs per person isn't always enough!
I was looking for a way to make them go further and it occurred to me I could adapt the wonderful chicken and ham pasta bake from Gill Holcombe's excellent first book, thereby also saving me from the bit of cooking I for some reason really dislike, which is boiling and draining pasta!

So:

Fry a pack of meatballs in a wide shallow pan (if you have one which is oven-safe you can save on washing up too!)
Once they are browned on all sides, add a finely chopped onion and sliced garlic if liked.
Add a handful of sliced chestnut mushrooms if you wish also.
Now open a litre carton of tomato juice and pour out a glassful. Save this for a Bloody Mary or just a refreshing drink later. Now pour the rest of the carton into the pan and stir in about half a pack of cream cheese until it is all melted in. You may wish to add any herbs or Marigold powder or other seasoning as wished.
Now add uncooked pasta shapes, about a handful per person, or premeasured if you prefer. Mix well. Then either pour into a baking dish, or if the pan is oven safe just put it straight in the oven at 180°C for 25-30 minutes, top with grated cheese and maybe some crushed crisps. Bake for another 10-15 mins and the pasta should be perfectly cooked. Serve with a salad or a cooked green veg.