This recipe is a world away from the kind of ‘spag bol’ I used to make in my student days – a quickly cooked sauce using just minced beef as the meat base which always seem to end up very watery. A good ragu on the other hand is a rich sauce, full of flavour…
Category: Pasta
Creamy cauliflower tagliatelle
Here’s another recipe to celebrate Veganuary (although I should say I’m not doing the full vegan diet this month, just using this time as an incentive to cut down on meat). This recipe is from Miguel Barclay’s book Vegan One Pound Meals – part of his fantastic One Pound Meals cook book series which is…
Butternut squash lasagne
I love this recipe because it is so seasonal – the butternut squash was in my Oddbox recently and I already had most of the other ingredients in stock (including sage from my garden). I just needed to buy the ricotta and mozzarella. One of the pleasures of subscribing to Oddbox is that I start…
Creamy chicken and mushroom pappardelle
The inspiration for this recipe was the ingredients I just happened to have in my fridge. It’s a bit like the TV show ‘Ready, Steady Cook’ where contestants have to create a dish from four or five random ingredients. I used to love watching ‘Ready, Steady, Cook’ when I was in between work contracts (a…
Smoked mackerel pasta
This is my version of a Nigella recipe (from her Nigellissma book) which in turn is based on a traditional Sicilian recipe – pasta con le sarde (pasta with sardines). I’ve eaten pasta con le sarde in Sicily, in a small village, in a traditional family run restaurant where it was the house speciality. The…
Pasta salad
This is a pasta salad I made just before the lockdown restrictions came into force – which seems like forever now, but it’s only actually about two weeks ago. At the time there was a wave of panic buying and I was having real trouble finding anything in the shops. Things have calmed down a…
Quarantine food kit
The Coronavirus crisis is affecting everyone worldwide. It’s becoming more and more scary and the news and government advice changes every day. Any time now in the UK we could find ourselves in lockdown. Food supplies and grocery items are getting harder to find because of panic buying. I haven’t been able to buy loo…
Macaroni cheese
I made mac n cheese last night for a friend who came over to supper. He wanted to go over his pitch for a business idea – he’s made it to the semi finals of an entrepreneurial competition (very exciting) so it was a bit of a working dinner. He’s eaten my mac n cheese…
Pasta puttanesca
Pasta puttanesca, or prostitutes’ pasta (so named perhaps because it is so quick to make it left ladies of the night more time to earn their living) is one of my store cupboard standby recipes. I nearly always have the ingredients in stock and it’s also really handy to make on holiday. If I know…
Pasta bake
With the temperature plummeting it’s time to roll out some comfort, carb heavy recipes. As pasta bakes are cheap, tasty and very easy to make they can be top of your list. I say easy but I have just remembered an occasion years ago when I was cooking with my then teenage niece and we…
Cheap and cheesy vegetable bake
I popped into Sainsbury’s on my way back from a trip to Somerset on Sunday and found a packet of Brussels sprouts in the bargain section – 300g reduced from 80p to 19p – so I decided to use them in a vegetable bake. Added to a few florets of cauliflower (taken from a cauliflower…
Super green lasagne
I had a similar lasagne last week at The Magic Garden pub in Battersea – it was delicious – and as usual when I find something particularly good I want to see if I can make my own. The Magic Garden used asparagus and I did too because I found a packet at a reduced…
Cheap, fresh and easy 