Cheesy Tomato and Veggie Pasta Bake

Yay! It's Spring time! And daylight savings! I love nothing better than cooking in my kitchen when it's still light - it's so nice and bright and the lighter evenings are promises of the approaching summer. It also means time to plant a new veggie garden, which I managed to do a couple of weekends ago, including potting some herbs for my window sill.

The weekend before last we were in Brisbane for a wedding, which was lovely - and warm. A couple of days before we left I wanted to try and use up some of the veggies we had in the fridge. Plus it was a Monday, so a good reason to have a meat-free meal. This recipe is great as you can pretty much put in whatever you like/have on hand/need to use up and it's very accommodating. And if you really need meat, you can add that in too. This concoction comes straight from the mind of yours truly!

1 tablespoon oil
1/2 onion
1 stalk celery
1 zucchini
1/2 red capsicum
6 mushrooms
2 cloves garlic, crushed
1/2 teaspoon dried chilli flakes/fresh chilli
2 tablespoons tomato paste
1/2 teaspoon smoked paprika
1 tablespoon harissa paste (optional)
can chopped tomatoes
1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar or 1 teaspoon of sugar (optional)
couple of handfuls of spinach
250g pasta - I used macaroni but whatever you like is fine
50g feta cheese
parmesan cheese
handful of fresh parsley

Preheat the oven to 200 degrees celsius. Chop up the onion, celery, zucchini, capsicum and mushrooms. Heat a little oil in a pan on medium heat and, when hot, add the veggies. Cook for about 5 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the onion is starting to become clear and the veggies are softening, Add the garlic and chilli and stir, cooking for another minute or two. Add the tomato paste, smoked paprika and harissa paste and stir, cooking for another minute. I love harissa and always have a jar in the fridge - it's so versatile and gives things a real depth of flavour. I often just have it on toast with eggs and avocado, It shouldn't be too hard to find, but it's not in every supermarket. Next, add the chopped tomatoes, stir, season and simmer for about 10 minutes. At this point, get some water on to boil on the stove, with a little salt and olive oil. Add the pasta when the water is boiling. Taste the sauce and depending on what you like, you can add either the balsamic vinegar or sugar to take away from the tartness of the tomato if you need it. Drain the pasta when cooked to al dente and tip back into the empty pot, off the heat. Add the spinach to the sauce and stir to wilt the spinach, then tip the sauce into the pot with the pasta. Stir gently to combine. Crumble the feta on top and the chopped fresh parsley and give it another quick mix. Pour into a rectangle baking dish, or 4-6 small dishes. Grate over the parmesan cheese to your liking and bake in the oven for 20 minutes.

Serve with a side salad. Creamy and cheesy but fresh and tomatoey at the same time. A great dish to use up leftover veggies and get your 5+ a day at the same time - and it's perfect for leftovers the next day or feeding a few hungry people.

Macaroni Cheese

This recipe is the BOMB. If you need some winter comfort food, look no further than this creamy, cheesy, carby bad boy. For my birthday I was given two cookbooks, one of which was The Great New Zealand Cookbook. Having a flick through, I came across this recipe for macaroni cheese. This is something I've never actually made before and hadn't eaten in ages, so I thought I'd give it a try. This recipe is by Laurent Loudeac of Hippopotamus,one of the fanciest restaurants in Wellington. It made 5-6 portions for us, although the recipe says 4 but it's definitely quite rich - there's a lot of cheese in there - so smaller portions were fine for us on this particular evening.

250g macaroni

100g butter

100g plain flour

500ml milk

100g blue cheese, crumbled

100g ham, chopped - this is optional and you could easily leave it out and make it vegetarian. I used chorizo sausage, as I had some handy.

50-100g spinach

1/4 cauliflower - this wasn't in the recipe, but I had some leftover from the veggie curry

75g cheese (cheddar or Gruyere), grated - the recipe actually says 200g but I found 75g was just fine.

Pre-heat the oven to 180 degrees celsius. Cook the macaroni in a large pot of salted boiling water until al dente - usually about 6 minutes. While the pasta is cooking, melt the butter in a small pot and add the flour, stirring until you get a paste (roux). Add the milk slowly, whisking as you go to break up any lumps. Cook until you have a nice thick white sauce (bechamel). This took me a little while and a lot of stirring to get the sauce to thicken, but without it sticking to the bottom of the pot. Season to taste and then add the blue cheese, ham - or in this case, chorizo - and spinach. I also added the cauliflower at this point. I love to add extra veggies to dishes where I can, and spinach is a good one, so I always use extra. It adds a nice bit of colour to this dish too. Drain the pasta and pour the sauce over it, in the large pot. Stir well to combine and poor into either a large oven proof dish, or small individual dishes. Sprinkle the grated cheese over the top and bake for 25-30 minutes or until it's golden and crispy on top - I put the grill on for the last few minutes of cooking, just to get a really nice crust. Serve with a salad on the side - which I didn't this time, but I'd recommend it just to cut through the richness of all that cheese. Yum!

Veggie Curry with Chickpeas

I have recently rediscovered the library and I had a brainwave when I was there recently - I can get cook books out from the library! My first selection was Jamie Oliver's 30 minute meals. I've made a few recipes from here before - some of them are conveniently found on the internet - and this one is probably my favourite. I've made it heaps of times over the last few years - it's easy, has loads of veggies and you can actually make it in 30 minutes...without all the other accompaniments that go with this recipe in the book, that is. It's actually called Curry Rogan Josh in the book, but you can make it any kind of curry, just choose whichever kind of paste you like.

I also made the Piri Piri Chicken and the Kind Of Sausage Cassoulet while I had this book out from the library. I didn't rate the sausage cassoulet - it was too oniony for my taste - but the piri piri chicken was really delicious, as were the lemony potatoes with feta, chilli and coriander that went with it. I forgot to take any photos when I made it however, so no blog about it....this time. Anyway, back to the curry. I usually make some adjustments to the amounts of some things in the recipe, so this is my slightly altered version, which should do two meals and two lunches the next day.

1 onion
1/2 medium butternut squash
1/2 small cauliflower
1 fresh red chilli (optional)
2 cloves of garlic (3 if they're small)
a bunch of coriander
1/4 of a 283g jar of Patak's curry paste. I usually go for korma, but this time they only had 'mild curry paste' at the supermarket
1 x 400g can of chickpeas
100g prewashed baby spinach
1 cup (ish) natural yoghurt
oil for cooking

Peel and slice the onion and put into a large pan or pot with some oil and a splash of water, on a medium heat. Use the neck half of the butternut squash, so you don't have to de-seed it. Chop it up into 1cm pieces, skin and all, and add it to the pan. The skin becomes really tender so you won't even notice it, and it saves having to chop the skin off which is really fiddly. Chop up the cauliflower into bite-sized pieces and add to the pan, along with the sliced fresh chilli. I really like cauliflower in curries as it's such a great texture with excellent absorption qualities - so add a bit more if you fancy it. Crush in the garlic and chop up about half the bunch of coriander, including the stalks, and add to the pan. Add in a couple of splashes of water, the curry paste and the can of chickpeas, including the juices. Season, stir well, put the lid on and turn the heat up to medium-high. Basically, just cook this (hard and fast, as Jamie says) for about 20 minutes, stirring occasionally, and adding more water if it starts to look a bit dry. Add the spinach about 5 minutes before the end and stir through. Cook the rice while the curry is cooking (see below). When it's all done, divide the rice and curry between plates and add about 1/4 cup of yoghurt onto the top of each, with some chopped coriander leaves.

As as little aside, I am rubbish at cooking rice, however I learnt the best and most simple way from this recipe. Fill a mug with rice, put it into a pot and then add two mugs of boiling water with a little olive oil, a pinch of salt and a few cloves if you have them. Put the lid on and cook on a medium heat for 7 minutes. Then take the pot off the heat and leave it, with the lid on, for another 7 minutes - this gets you nice and fluffy rice and (almost) never fails!

Tomato and Chilli Chutney

I had quite a few green chillis on my plant in the garden recently and I was really hoping they would ripen at the same time so I could make some chilli chutney or relish. But they didn't - they ripened frustratingly slowly, one by one. Not helped by our cat pulling a couple off the plant before they were ready, bringing them inside and giving them a good chew. I did however pay a visit to my aunt in Martinborough - who supplied the olive oil used for the pesto a few weeks back - and she gave me an abundance of chillis from her garden. Back on track.

I love a good chutney, especially with cheese and crackers or in sandwiches, and this recipe was so easy. It was from BBC Good Food, which is another of my go-to websites. It was submitted by a reader, so I was a tiny bit sceptical, but it had some positive comments and seemed super easy so I thought I'd give it a go. I made a half batch, because I don't have a really big pot at the moment, so that's the quantities I've listed below. It made one and a half medium jars and one small jar, which was plenty for just two of us. Just double everything if you want more.

Tomato and Chilli Chutney

250g red onion, roughly chopped
500g tomatoes, roughly chopped
3 garlic cloves -  4 if you're doubling this recipe - roughly chopped or crushed
4-6 chillis, roughly chopped - I used 4 and it's a bit on the spicy side, so I'd recommend less if you don't like it too spicy, or removing the seeds
A thumb-sized piece of ginger, peeled and chopped
125g brown sugar
75ml red wine vinegar
5 cardamom seeds - I had ground cardamom in my pantry, so I used about 1/4 teaspoon of that instead
1/4 tablespoon of paprika - add a little more if you like the smoky flavour, like I do

Put all your ingredients into a pot and bring to a gentle simmer, stirring occasionally. If you're making a half recipe, like I did, you might need to add a splash of water as well - but not too much as the tomatoes have a lot of water in them. Simmer on a low heat for one hour, without a lid on. Use a hand blender to blend the ingredients, but just a little as you don't want to purée it - it should still be chunky. Bring it to a gentle boil again, and boil until it looks shiny, thick and sticky. This should only take a few minutes. Spoon into sterilized jars. I had no idea how to sterilize jars because this is the first time I've made anything that goes in jars, so I just boiled some water in a pot and put the jars in for a few minutes and took them out with tongs. Turns out the same website this recipe is from, has some handy instructions here if you need them though. Refrigerate in the jars overnight. The recipe says it will keep for 6 weeks.

Nice and spicy and sticky and excellent with cheese. I'll definitely make this again now I know it's good - and I'd make the full recipe as a few extra jars would make great gifts. I even made some cute labels, and gave the small jar to our upstairs neighbours.

Basil Pesto

I was recently in the enviable position - and fairly uncommon for an amateur city gardener, in my experience - of having a fairly bushy basil plant that was starting to go to seed. Basil needs a really sunny spot - and fortunately my wee garden bed gets lots of it - but only a few months ago, my basil was a forlorn little thing and had mostly been eaten up by bugs. I was on the verge of pulling it out and planting another one when suddenly it rescued itself and took off! Miracle basil! And of course when I thought about what I could do with all my basil, I immediately thought pesto. This is a super easy recipe by the free range cook herself, Annabel Langbein. Her recipe apparently makes a lot more than I ended up with but by the time I got all the basil leaves off my plant, I didn't have quite as much as I'd originally thought.

Basil Pesto

2 packed cups basil leaves - I had 1 cup
2 large garlic cloves, crushed
3/4 cup good quality olive oil - I used about 1/4 cup
1/4 cup grated parmesan
1/2 teaspoon of salt
ground black pepper
1/4 cup toasted pine nuts of walnuts (optional) - I used a mix of toasted pine nuts and cashew nuts


This recipe is so simple as all you really need to do is whizz it all up in the food processor.
I used a mix of cashew and pine nuts because pine nuts are pretty expensive and cashews have just as nice a flavour. I toasted them lightly in a dry pan first. Even though I had half the amount of basil leaves, I still used the same amount of everything else, but only 1/4 cup of olive oil. I put everything except the olive oil into the food processor, blitzed it, and the added a bit of olive oil at a time while I blended it a bit slower until I was happy with the consistency - I prefer a little less oil, but you might like a bit more. Good quality olive oil is very important, to get a really nice flavour. My aunt and her partner live in Martinborough and grow their own olives which they press at the village press and I was lucky enough to be given a bottle last Christmas, so I used that.

You can store the pesto in the fridge for two weeks, or freeze it in small containers, according to Annabel. Mine only made one small container though, so I ate it over the next week on crackers, on toast, and stirred through spaghetti with some lightly friend broccoli, kale, spinach, chilli and lemon. Yum!

Huevos Rancheros

We invited my parents came over for brunch over the Easter weekend. They wanted to come visit mostly because they wanted to check out the new-ish couch we got and see our kitten, who's fast becoming a cat....oh and us. I wanted to make something for brunch, that would be filling, but wouldn't mean I had to spend too much time in the kitchen while they were here. I also had a beautiful red chilli that was ripe and ready to be picked from my garden, so huevos rancheros was where it was at.

This recipe is a Jamie Oliver one. I am a bit on-the-fence about the purveyor of pukka tukka. Some of his recipes are great and I use them over and over, others are too involved (30 minutes my arse) or have too many ingredients, some of which can be hard to find. I do have a good vegetarian rogan josh recipe of his that I've used millions of times that I'll blog about at some point. Anyway - this recipe falls into the good category - nice and simple and not a single crazy ingredient.

Huevos Rancheros - or as Jamie likes to call it Mexican Breakfast (how British)

olive oil

1 onion, peeled and finely sliced
2 cloves of garlic, peeled and finely sliced
2 red peppers, deseeded and finely sliced
2 fresh red or orange chillis, deseeded and finely sliced
1 large dried chilli
3 fresh bay leaves
sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
2 x 400g tins of chopped tomatoes
2 large tomatoes, sliced
6 large eggs
6 tortillas
150g cheddar cheese, to serve

My mum is not a big fan of really spicy food, so I only used one fresh chilli and instead of a large dried chilli, I used some dried chilli flakes. I also used dried bay leaves, and instead of tortillas, I served it with some fresh, sliced bread that I drizzled with olive oil and put under the grill for a couple of minutes each side. I don't think this recipe would really serve 6 people if you followed it to the letter - I used 1 and 3/4 tins of tomatoes, 3/4 of one red pepper and 4 eggs and it served 4 of us, but with no leftovers. I think you'd need another half tin of tomatoes at least to stretch it to 6 people, unless you weren't very hungry.

I started by doing the sauce before the parentals arrived, so all I had to do was add the eggs and grill the bread when they got here. Heat the oil on a high heat, add the onion, garlic, peppers, fresh and dried chillis, bay leaves and salt and pepper. Stir and cook for 15 minutes to soften and caramelize everything. I turned the heat down to medium and stirred it pretty consistently so it didn't burn or stick. Add the tinned tomatoes and break them up a bit if necessary. Bring to the boil and turn down to a medium heat and cook it until it begins to reduce down to a thick stew-like consistency. Add more salt and pepper if you need to. I took it off the heat at this point and waited for the 'rents to arrive. When we were ready to eat, I sliced one tomato (because I don't really like fresh tomato, ok) on the top and made wells in the tomato stew and cracked the eggs in. Season from a height (not too sure what the height adds to it), put the lid on and let the eggs poach for about 3-4 minutes - you should be able to see when they're set, or just give them a poke. Grill the bread or warm the tortillas while the eggs are cooking. I sprinkled some fresh parsley from my garden onto the top, took the frying pan right to the table and served the grated cheese and bread on the side so everyone could do their own.

Sometimes when I make this I also add beans (cannellini beans are my favourites), to make it a bit more substantial. Next time I'll add some chopped up chorizo when I'm cooking the onion and red pepper at the beginning - the garlicy, spiciness would go really well in this dish I think,

Indian Potato and Chickpea Wraps

I'm always on the look out for quick, healthy and tasty recipe ideas. I must admit that I don't often have the patience for food that takes a long time to prepare, especially during the week - by the time I get home from work, I am ready to eat, so anything that can go from fridge to plate in under an hour is my go-to.

I've had a subscription to Healthy Food Guide for the last couple of years, so not surprisingly, a lot of my inspiration comes from these monthly magazines. There are also heaps of recipes on their website, so if I'm looking for seasonal recipes or a healthy variation on something, that's often where I look first.

I also like to try and eat a fair bit of vegetarian food. Not only because it's tasty, I enjoy it and it's cheaper, but it's a good way to get a veggie boost and it's more environmentally friendly - we don't necessarily do Meat Free Monday, but we do try to have at least one or two dinners a week with no meat.

This is one of the latest I've made - it's really filling and super tasty.

Indian potato and chickpea wraps (from the April 2015 issue of Healthy Food Guide)

3 large potatoes
1 large onion, thinly sliced
1 tablespoon of oil
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon ground turmeric
1 teaspoon garam masala (I used some daal masala my sister sent me when she travelled to India)
400g can chickpeas, drained
2 tablespoons of liquid honey
1/2 teaspoon of salt
1 teaspoon cumin seeds
1 teaspoon black sesame seeds (I used regular sesame seeds)
1 cup frozen peas
1/2 cup fresh coriander, chopped
6-8 tortillas

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees celsius. Cook the potato in boiling water until soft (about 10-15 minutes). When the potatoes are almost cooked, fry the onion in the oil until clear. Add the spices and cook for about a minute, stirring regularly. Remove from the heat. Drain and roughly mash the potatoes and add them to the onions and spices, along with the chickpeas, honey, salt, peas, cumin seeds, sesame seeds and coriander (but leave some of the last three to use as a garnish at the end) and stir to combine. I placed about a 1/2 cup of mixture into the middle of the tortilla and bring the sides in to wrap it - you can use more filling if you're making less, or you have large tortillas - I made 8 medium size ones, so we could take leftovers for lunch. Secure the wrap with a toothpick if you need to. Put them into an oven proof dish, spray or brush with a little oil, sprinkle over the leftover cumin and sesame seeds and bake for 10 minutes until wraps are crispy. Top with the remainder of the fresh coriander and serve.

The only addition I made to this recipe was a yoghurt dipping sauce I made up to go with it:

1 cup plain, natural yoghurt
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1/2 teaspoon of honey
Splash of lemon juice
Fresh chopped coriander
Freshly ground pepper

I found these really filling and the spices just make it so delicious. The dipping sauce added a little spicy sweetness to it too. Next time I'd probably add some additional veggies, like spinach or even substituting some of the potato for cauliflower would work a treat too.