World Cup Food Challenge: Switzerland - Pizzocheri

I had always assumed that Switzerland would be the runners up in Group E.  That said it all came down to the last match.  France didn't do them any favours, only managing a draw against Ecuador.  A spirited 3-0 victory against Honduras was enough for the Swiss team to book their place in tonight's match against the mighty Argentina.

Having made a fondue for Switzerland in the opening round of the World Cup Food Challenge I was stumped for what to cook tonight.  What other food is synonymous with the Swiss?  I didn't want to start messing around with chocolate.  I have fought the good fight against rosties in the past and frankly, I never want to eat burnt and raw grated potato again.  Other possibilities included Muesli, but I want an evening meal not breakfast, and Berner Platte, but that is too similar to last night's choucroute garni and I couldn't face that again for a while.

Then I discovered that the Swiss have a healthy love for pasta.  Sharing a border with Italy was bound to rub off some influences.  Unlike the Italians though, the Swiss favour buckwheat pasta and I couldn't think of anywhere in Leeds that I'd be able to buy any, so I decided to make my own from scratch.  All I needed was some buckwheat flour and I had two options of where to get some.  My first were sold out and expecting a delivery on Friday, my second choice, Out of This World, had flour aplenty.

Making the pasta was child's play, so much so that I employed R, with a little supervision, to cut out the pasta after we had made the dough.  I'm sure Pizzocheri isn't meant to have wavy edges but that is the cutter that he chose.  The strips of pasta were cooked in plenty of boiling water with some potatoes, green beans and spinach.  Once cooked and drained the pasta and vegetables were layered with cheese in an oven proof dish and topped with fried onions, garlic, sage leaves and melted butter.

My favourite line of the recipe is the last one.  "Bake in preheated oven for 5–10 minutes at 250 ºCelsius. The cheese must melt."  And melt it did.  A bit of research into pizzocheri tells you that this is a favourite winter warmer and I can see why.  It definitely fits into the comfort food category.  The pasta has a lovely flavour from the buckwheat, and who doesn't love double carbs?

Sadly, by the time I had finished eating, Switzerland had been knocked out of the world cup by Argentina.  I know I'll be making fondue again and I'm sure that pizzocheri will make a return when the cold weather sets in.

Spaghetti and Meatballs

I know, I know. You hang around for ages waiting for a blog post and two come along at once.  Well I'm sorry for the delay, I really am, but circumstances at work and at home have changed so I haven't really had the head space or time to write.  On the odd occasion that I have had a window of opportunity to write I haven't been doing the cooking, and writing about food that you haven't cooked yourself isn't as easy as it seems.

I have tried to write, I really have. I have draft posts for Indian inspired Fish and Chips, Green Cauliflour Cheese, Chocolate Turkey Fajitas, Seafood Pancakes, and Rabbit Stew and Dumplings.  There are also a couple of posts relating to our experience of giving up Supermarkets for Lent.  But these things will remain in draft until such time as we cook the dishes again*.

On top of work I have also been training for my first half marathon.  Getting home from work and going out for anything between a 6k and a 10k run before even contemplating food, really reduces the amount of free time in the evenings, before going to bed and starting the whole thing again in the morning.  But with the half marathon behind me** we're settling into a new routine, which should see me at the stove more often.

Apart from anything else, I have instigated yet another food challenge.  You may have noticed that there's the small matter of the World Cup looming on the horizon.  Whether England win the tournament, make it out of their group, or capitulate and lose all of their opening matches is neither here nor there.  A group of us will be eating dishes representing all 32 of countries taking part in Brazil.  You can follow our progress here.

In the mean time, we have tried to be very organised on the food front.  Our weekly meal planning has gone from strength to strength.  We either plan after a veg box delivery from Market Delivered, or before we do our big shop for the week.  This is the only way we have found of making sure we always use the food we have and limit food waste.

Tonight we had planned to have spaghetti with a beef ragu using some braising steak that was lurking in the freezer, however, in the interests of a happy house, we have allowed a change of plan to suit the mood of our youngest and fussiest family member.  Rather than defrosting the steak we acquiesced and took some pork mince out of the freezer to make meatballs.  It really wasn't such a big change as the sauce for both dishes contain the same ingredients.

Fried onions and fennel seeds were added to the mince before it was rolled into ping-pong ball sized spheres.  These were then poached in the tomato and vegetable sauce before being piled onto the pasta and served with garlic bread.  Everybody was happy and cleared their plates so it was a worthwhile change of plan.  I don't have Italy in my group for the World Cup Food Challenge so I'll not need to cook any pasta dishes during the tournament.  What to cook for Ecuador is another matter all together.

*Hopefully won't be too long as they were all very good.
**I'm still running, just not as far.

Oxtail Ragu

You would think that after almost two years and over three hundred posts that I would know if I had written something before.  I know that I have repeated recipes in that time, some things* crop up quite often, but now that Tonight's Menu isn't daily I just manage not to write about those meals.  However, it turns out that my ageing memory is still prone to playing tricks on me.

I could have sworn that I had told you all** about the joys of Oxtail Ragu.  I was certain that I would be going over old ground if I told you that The Geometry of Pasta is one of my favourite cookery books.  At least three other people held the same opinion, but I have been through the archives with a fine tooth comb and I can only find fleeting reference to this wonderful dish, so here we go.

I've been looking for an excuse and the time to cook oxtail ragu for months.  The last time I made it was back in December when we had a house full of guests for Christmas.  One tail makes easily enough ragu to serve five people, so it's the perfect dish for a big family gathering, or two greedy people who love leftovers.

There isn't much point reducing the recipe either, as even when sold cut up, oxtails are always sold as the entire tail.  This is a hangover from the days of Mad Cow Disease and the threat of CJD.  One tail, some stock veg, half a bottle of white wine*** and two tins of tomatoes are all you need, but you could add some bay leaves or other hard herbs.  The whole lot gets cooked together for as long as possible.  I suppose if you have a slow cooker you could use that.  I just left my pan on a very low heat for 6 hours the day before we planned to eat the sauce.

The original recipe in The Geometry of Pasta suggests that the oxtail should become the meal on day one and the sauce reserved for day two but I like to strip the meat from the bones, shred it between two forks and mix it back into the sauce.  The book also claims that this is a sauce for penne, but I don't hold to much stock in the assertion that you need the right pasta for a specific sauce.  Use whatever shape of pasta you have, but do try the oxtail ragu.

*see spaghetti bolognese, and sausage and bean casserole.
**hello Mum.
***yes white wine, trust me.

Tagliatelle with Cauliflower Leaves, Bacon and Pine Nuts

Well, Mum has gone after a lovely week visiting us from Auld Reekie.  It's nice having her around and the extra pair of hands is always welcome when we're trying to get things done and R is playing up.  Last weekend, before she left, we took a trip up to Headingley on a two pronged mission.  Z wanted to visit Heart and Craft to meet up with some of her crafty friends and I felt the need to mooch around the Headingley Farmers Market.

We were specifically looking for something to have for our dinner on Sunday but we ended up with our bags full of exiting ingredients.  The star find was an enormous Pattypan Squash, but I'll come back to that tomorrow.  From the same stall as the squash we also picked up a Kohlrabi that was turned into a gratin that we had with a beef stew on Sunday, and a cauliflower.

We will be having cauliflower cheese later in the week but, unlike shop bought cauli's, the beast we bought from Headingley came complete with a bushel of foliage.  I hate chucking food away but had never considered cauliflower leaves to be a source of nutrition.  A quick internet search later confirmed that I was not going to poison myself or Z by eating the leaves.  Google didn't serve up much by the way of recipes however, so I pretty much made up Tonight's Menu as I went along.

We cook pasta with kale quite often so I was happy that I could do the same kind of thing with the cauliflower leaves.  I fried onions, garlic and some bacon in a little olive oil before adding the greens and a splash of white wine.  With the wine reduced and the greens wilted I added some toasted pine nuts, cooked tagliatelle, a splash of the pasta water and some grated parmesan cheese.

I have got absolutely no idea why I have never done this before, but cooking cauliflower leaves just makes sense.  They aren't as strong as kale or even cabbage, but they were tasty and as it keeps less food going into the bin, I'll definitely be cooking with them again.  Oh, and this would easily make a good vegetarian meal but I'm sure you can work that out for yourselves.

Macaroni Cheese

It's funny how these things happen.  There was I, extolling the virtues of Rick Stein's India, when an on-line conversation moved rapidly from curry to Macaroni Cheese via pork chops and pesto.  There and then I knew that it wouldn't be long until it found its way into our plans.  That was last week and it happened in a corner of the internet that isn't full of my usual cohort of foodies.

Imagine my surprise then, when one of my food friends started talking about having macaroni and cheese.  In a third and unrelated conversation about meal planning, an other friend decided to change their plans for stuffed rolled pork loin in favour of "mac and chee", such is the power of suggestion.  

We had planned to have our macaroni and cheese on Thursday as a family meal after a day out together.  Our plans were changed however by a belly busting lunch in town.  By the time R's tea time came around we were still full and not in the slightest bit interested in eating more food.

Any other meal may well have fallen off the meal planner for a week or two, but macaroni cheese has a strange power.  Once you have decided that you are going to cook it, it has to be cooked, as my on-line discussions seemed to prove.  Our planned meal for this evening was steak with boulangere potatoes.  We'll now be having that some time next week.

As with so many family favourites, macaroni and cheese is a very personal dish.  Some people will use any old pasta shape.  Some will have a particular cheese that must be in the sauce.  We stick to macaroni but use whatever cheese we have in the house.  Today our sauce had mature cheddar, wenslydale and jarlesberg.  Along with cheese and pasta, our macaroni cheese is always topped with sliced tomatoes, breadcrumbs and extra cheese.  Sadly there were no leftovers, but we do still have steak to look forward to, so all is not lost.

Lasagne

Perhaps I am the type of person who is easily led, there is every chance that I am the kind of person that subliminal advertising works on.  I say this because ever since the horse meat scandal broke, I have been craving lasagne.  It doesn't take much for me to want a lasagne but when every news story on television and radio is leading with a dish of layered meat and pasta I was eventually going to cave in.

The horse meat scandal has got a lot of people very hot under the collar.  I'm not going to stand here and take any moral stance about cooking from scratch rather than eating ready meals.  We all make choices about how and where to spend our money.  I choose to buy ingredients and cook with them, it's how I relax and I find the process enjoyable.  Others don't have the same relationship with food as I do, each to their own.  I do have a slight problem with the way the focus of this particular food scare is running.

In the past* we have been quite rightly worried about food that could kill us.  The Salmonella scare of the 80s had us boiling eggs until you could play squash with them and roasting chicken until the bones had melted.  In the 90s, the threat of Mad Cow Disease turned a lot of my class mates vegetarian.  My family ate more beef as the prices dropped and it didn't do me any harm.  The current wave of worry about what's on your plate does not compare.  Horse (unless it contains the drug bute) is not harmful.  I've never tried it myself but I have eaten Zebra. 

The problem this time is that we haven't been given the choice to eat horse or not.  If I ever happen across horse on a restaurant menu then I'm sure that will be the dish I choose**.  Having eaten horse I may discover that I like it and then look for it on the supermarket shelves and ask my butcher if he can get any in.  But we live in Britain, a country where horses like Toy Town win Olympic medals, and Frankel is put out to stud at £125,000 per cover.  There is not an appetite for eating horse, I don't have a problem with that but I do wish we weren't so squeamish about the food that we eat.  Meat does not come shrink-wrapped on a blue polystyrene tray, it is a part of an animal.  If you can't cope with that small nugget of information then perhaps your lasagne should contain quorn not horse.

Aside from the labelling, I do have an other problem with horsegate.  The media*** keep referring to horse meat in the food chain.  Now given that horse is being eaten this is technically correct, however, the story is about horse in the distribution chain.  A food chain is a linear sequence of links showing species being eaten by the next species in the chain.  It's quite simple. 

At the bottom of any food chain is something that eats nothing else, take a plant for example.  Getting all the nutrients it needs from the soil, air and sun the plant doesn't want for much.  Minding it's own business the plant is harvested and devoured by passing insects.  A larger insect, the dragonfly, eats the small insects and takes their carcases back to the dragonfly hive where the small insect bodies are laid down in octagonal cells where over a number of months they become Marmite****.  The wayward dragonfly is the prey of many a small hunting bird, such as the robin or spotted fly catcher.  Neither of these birds are lovers of Marmite but they do love dragonflies.  The chain does not end here, there is always a larger bird.  The sparrow hawk is designed by boffins to swoop out of the sky picking off small birds while they are still wiping insect extract from their beaks after a slap-up three course dragonfly meal.  Nothing eats the sparrow hawk so it is the top of this particular food chain.

One of the saddest things I have seen on the telly is the constant footage of sparrow hawks that have been cruelly struck down by long distance lorries cutting through the countryside following dodgy instructions from satnavs.  Nothing deserves to be struck down by a lost lorry but this starts another food chain.  Tyranosaurus-Rexs are actually scavengers not hunters.  They live on carrion (road kill if you will) so are constantly roaming the countryside looking out for sparrow hawks knocked down in their prime.  The T-Rex population cannot be allowed to grow unchecked so their numbers are monitored by trained game keepers who, under licence, can shoot adult T-Rex and sell their meat at market.  Now imagine just for one second that the next time you bite into a T-rex pie, some unscrupulous game keeper has cut the t-rex meat with Brachiosaurus.  I don't mind a bit of brachiosaur every now and then, but the only way that it should enter this food chain is if the t-rex ate it.  The brachiosaur has entered the delivery chain between the game keeper, the pie shop and your plate.

Cows eating what they shouldn't is how we got to the mad cow disease problem in the first place.  No cow has ever leapt out at and tucked into a horse, therefore horse is not part of the food chain.  Neither, I'm pleased to say, is brachiosaur.

Rest assured for my lasagne I did not hot foot it to my local supermarket looking for a lump of prime dinosaur.  Far from it.  The mince I used for the bolognese was minced beef from my favourite butcher***** on Leeds market.  I could have gone the whole hog and made fresh pasta but I am still wary of home made pasta after one too many disasters.

I do love a good lasagne.  If I'm honest this was not one of the best I've ever made but it was still a good plate of food.  Yes, meals like this can take a long time to cook but while they are cooking you are free to do other things, you could plan your next week's meals or fantasize about dinosaurs.  There is a lot of unravelling still to be done regarding horse DNA turning up where it shouldn't.  In the meantime, if you are worried about what you are eating, support your local butcher and cook from scratch, you never know, you might enjoy it.

*now is the ideal time to put on your free rose tinted glasses.
**this is why I have eaten escargot, I didn't go on a mission to find and eat snails but the opportunity arose and I took my chance.  For the record, if you like garlic butter there is no real reason why you wouldn't like snails, just so long as you have a strong jaw, they are quite chewy.
***this is not an exercise in media bashing
****this is a lie I have made up and that I am continuing to peddle to my son, parents can be so cruel can't they!
****he likes us because we buy his steak mince and not his extra lean steak mince.  He doesn't really want to sell extra lean mince but he has to provide to those who don't like flavour in their food.

Penne with Black Pudding and Tomato Sauce

Every now and then, like a magpie, I see something glinting at me and I have to make it mine.  I don't go in for collecting shiny objects but I do collect and store memories of recipes that I have seen.  Tonight's menu is just one of those captured objects.  As soon as the words "spaghetti with black pudding" flashed across my twitter feed I knew that I had to make it mine.

I love black pudding and I have never come across a variation of blood sausage that I haven't liked.  The German and French varieties are a bit on the soft side for my liking but as with most things in life I'll take the Pepsi Challenge*.  Knowing that I needed to cook this as soon as possible, I added black pudding to the shopping list and the rest is history.

The recipe was from Eat Like A Girl and I am very glad that I noticed it.  The sauce is so simple to make and cheap to boot, that we'll definitely be cooking it again.  The heavy seasoning from the black pudding really shone through the sauce like no bolognese ever could.  We will reduce the amount of sugar from the recipe in future as the tomatoes and black pudding were more than sweet enough for us.

*for those too young to remember, the Pepsi challenge was dreamt up by fizzy pop merchants Pepsi to convince the world that their cola drink was better than anybody else's cola drink.  Everybody in the known world states a preference for Pepsi, Coca Cola, Rolla Cola or even a supermarket own brand but lets be honest, who when ordering Coke in a bar turns down a drink after the barman tells you that they have a different brand? No body that's who.  I'm the same with Black Puddings.  I know the Bury pudding is great, I love the Scottish variety, I'm not mad on the Irish version, but I'm happy to take whatever is on offer. 

Rocket Pesto

Last year, in an attempt to battle our inability to get to the allotment, we transformed our meagre front garden into a little veg patch.  We grew a hand full of onions, had three courgette plants and trailed runner beans up the fence.  The majority of the space was reserved for lettuces.  We eat lot of salad so growing our own is a really good way to save cash.

Along with a couple of red lettuces* we grew a small amount of rocket.  We didn't buy a single bag of rocket last summer, it kept growing just as fast as we could eat it.  It grew so well that it was only in the depths of winter that it finally died down.  As the snow fell we forgot that it had ever been there.  A year on and we are now getting to the end of salad season again, only this year we didn't sew any.  The rocket returned from it's wintry grave and, where we had had six varieties of salad leaf, it has taken over.

With so much rocket we are widening our horizons away from salads and will be having a pop at rocket soup over the weekend.  Before that though, I have made the slightest dent in the rocket patch to make some fresh pesto.

Rocket, garlic, pine nuts, olive oil and cheese are combined to make a delicious peppery sauce that we had over pasta.  Parmesan is the traditional cheese for pesto but, for tonight's version, I added a good hand full of the Ribblesdale unpasteurised goats cheese that I bought for Thursday's Yorkshire Cheese night.  There will be more rocket inspired dishes soon, all ideas are welcome.

*it is a scientifically unproven fact that slugs and aphids do not attack red lettuce.  We have never had so much of a nibble on any or our reds, whereas standard green varieties get munched all the time.

Spaghetti al Funghi

Today we had a fantastic family outing to Sheffield.  The reason; The Sheffield Food Festival.  Twitter had alerted me of the existence of this South Yorkshire three day food-athon and so I was duty bound to visit.  Along with the treats on offer, the trip to Sheffield also meant that I could meet up with a couple of the other Olympic Food Challenge participants.

I'm always a bit wary when I go to food festivals.  So often I'm left disapointed.  Huddersfield is by far the best one I have visited but the people at Sheffield put on a good show.  There was a good variety of produce on offer* and there was plenty of space to sit and enjoy any food and drink that you bought.  I bought a chicken mole burrito, from The Street Food Chef, for lunch which sadly wasn't as great as I expected.  Don't get me wrong the burrito was good but the mole sauce was just too sweet for me.

The afternoon was spent lounging around the Peace Gardens soaking up the sun and the beers from the "craft" beer tent*.  My one plan was to seek out inspiration for tonight's meal and that came from Autumn Harvest, who can be found at lots of food fairs and markets in Yorkshire.  Sadly it is too early for Wood Blewit season but they did have some Chanterelle mushrooms which I hoovered up.

I'm not going to pretend that chanterelles are cheap, far from it, but they are really nice.  The flavour is subtle, less mushroomy and sweeter, more fruity than your average mushroom.  To make sure I didn't mask the 'shrooms I made a simple sauce for pasta by frying them in butter and olive oil with a little salt and pepper.  The sauce was finished with a splash of white wine, a handful of parsley and a little grated parmesan.  I'd normally add cream to a mushroom sauce, sometimes bacon makes an appearance too, but chanterelles are too special.  For an end of a foodie day treat, they were worth it.

*still a bit heavy on the cupcakes for my liking.
*I'm no beer geek but I'm sure that the beer on offer was closer to real ale than craft beer.

Tuna Pasta Bake

After a fair few drinks last night and a disappointing breakfast courtesy of the Olympic Food Challenge, Z and I decided that we needed a bit of a hug and some vegetables.  The only fresh vegetables that we had in the house were salad ingredients, everything else was frozen.  As I was definitely a few pints over the drink drive limit, a trip to the shops was out of the question.  We raided the store cupboards and resurrected a student stand-by; Tuna Pasta Bake.

A simple tomato sauce is made using onion, garlic and a tin of tomatoes.  From there you can season the sauce to your whim.  I added a glug of red wine vinegar, dried basil and oregano and some chilli flakes.  After the sauce had bubbled for about ten minutes I chucked in frozen peas and sweetcorn and a tin of tuna.  All that was left was to stir the sauce through some cooked pasta, dump some grated cheese on top and bake for about half an hour.

This is not the nicest, prettiest, or most worthy dish that I will ever cook, but it was perfect for the moment and a great reminder that food doesn't need to be complicated to be good.

Spaghetti and Meatballs

We still haven't managed to do a "big shop" since returning from our trip to Windsor so again tonight we are raiding the freezer for Tonight's Menu.  Standing out on the blackboard inventory was meatball mix but it wasn't until it was defrosted, that we discovered that inside the container was the leftover beef mixture from our Olympic Food Challenge adventure into Mongolian cooking, Buuz.

The minced beef, onion and caraway mixture was formed into golf ball sized balls and poached in a fresh tomato and basil sauce.  We deliberately kept the seasoning and flavours to a minimum as R was joining us and although he loves strong flavours we put a lot less salt in his cooking than in ours.

The meatballs were served, as tradition dictates, with spaghetti and parmesan cheese.  Z and I also had some garlic bread, which of course R stole some of.  We already knew that the caraway worked really well with the beef but what got me was the success of its combination with the tomato and basil.  I'm not sure if there are any Italian/Mongolian fusion restaurants out there but if there are they really need to get Spaghetti and Buuz-balls on their menu as soon as possible.

Spaghetti Bolognese

I'm now gearing up for the Olympic Food challenge, which I have set for myself and eleven other intrepid bloggers.  The challenge starts on Wednesday, so tonight and tomorrow we're falling back on simple recipes and using up fresh ingredients that we won't need over the next few weeks.  Tonight it's spaghetti bolognese.

I say it's spaghetti bolognese, but in reality it's spaghetti with a minced beef and vegetable tomato sauce.  To make life even easier for myself I made the sauce yesterday.  We all know that day old sauce tastes better whether it is a stew, pasta sauce or curry.  This was no exception to that rule.

Pasta with Lemon Balm Pesto

A caring friend recently brought me a present back from Rome.  It was a packet of the most garishly coloured pasta I have ever seen.  At its heart it is durum wheat farfalle but it has been coloured in candy stripes with tomato, red peppers, spinach, beetroot and blueberries.  There is no way that I could make a standard pasta sauce like bolognese with pasta like this, so it was kept in a cupboard until a suitable occasion.

Then, last week, out of the blue, I spotted something on my way home from work.  At first I thought it was a large and unwieldy mint plant that had propagated itself on a road side verge, but on closer inspection it was Lemon Balm.  Making a mental note of it's location I returned home to ask the oracle (twitter) if anybody had any culinary uses for this citrusy member of the mint family.  What I got back was mentions of tea and cordial but nothing that got my juices flowing.  I then did what most people of my generation do, I googled lemon balm.

I should have known that what I would get back was references to tea and cordial.  In despiration I even looked at the wikipedia entry for lemon balm where this line "It can be used in fish dishes and is the key ingredient in lemon balm pesto" caught my eye.  As you can see there is no link to a recipe but my mind was made up, pesto it was.

A large bunch of lemon balm, picked on my way home from work, was blended with a clove of garlic, a handful of toasted pine nuts, a handful of pecorino and plenty of olive oil and to back up the citrus, a squeeze of lemon juice.  The pesto was simply stired through the cooked pasta and served.  The lemon flavour is really subtle in lemon balm, it is almost in the air around the leaves and not in the leaves themselves so the extra lemon juice was a good idea. 

With the right kit you could easily make this in the time it takes to cook the pasta for a really fast and very healthy evening meal.  With a good knife or mezzeluna it might take a little while longer but the results would still be worth the effort, you don't even need psychedelic pasta, but if you've got some, it makes for an attractive meal.

Leek and Ricotta Cannelloni

This is my final week* of working the late shift at work.  The working pattern hasn't actually been too bad but getting home late, eating and then trying to find a bit of time to unwind before going to bed has proven to be difficult.  My nights have been getting later and R has still been getting up at 6am, so I'm lacking a fair amount of beauty sleep.  I have been spending my mornings catching up on housework, that would normally be done in the evenings, and trying to sort out the finances for Beeston Festival.  Today however, I found myself with some spare time.

Along with not getting to spending much quality time with R, the other thing I have really missed while working late, is cooking.  Not only do I love cooking for people, I also find the process to be really relaxing and the perfect way to wind down, so with some time on my hands I rolled up my sleeves and used as many pans and utensils as was possible.

Making cannelloni is a time consuming yet rewarding exercise.  I am sure that there are short cuts but
I didn't take any today.  I started by making the filling and the tomato sauce.  The tomato sauce is not much more than a seasoned tin of tomatoes with softened onions, garlic and dried basil.  After simmering for five to ten minutes I took a hand blender to the sauce and removed the lumps.

The filling was equally simple.  I softened a shredded leek in olive oil with garlic and a couple of teaspoons of lemon thyme.  Once this was cooked I let it go completely cold before stirring through a tub of riccotta.  I then spooned the mixture into eight cannelloni tubes covered them in the tomato sauce, some mozzarella and parmeasan.  At that stage I stopped and went to work with the dish ready for Z to put in the oven when she got in from work.

When it finally came out of the oven it looked a treat.  I'm glad to say that it tasted as good as it looked.  The only thing I would change next time was adding a bit more salt in the filling, as when cooked the ricotta masked the other flavours.  I had also considered adding pine nuts to the filling mixture, this would have turned tonight's meal from a really good meal into a great one.

*for now.

Spaghetti al Funghi

When planning our meals for the week we tend to start with whatever is still lurking from the previous week's shopping.  The stand out item this week, not having many leftovers at all, was a full, unopened, tub of double cream.  Now I don't have a sweet tooth at all and Z would never indulge herself to the extent of using an entire tub of cream so it was destined for a savoury dish.

The cream was added to fried onions, mushrooms and bacon and allowed to come to the boil before a large handful of parsley and plenty of black pepper were stirred through the sauce.  Cooked spaghetti was then mixed through the cream so that every strand was coated.  This could so easily have been a vegetarian meal, just leave out the bacon and adjust the seasoning as cream does need quite a lot of salt to pull savoury flavours through.  I know this is an autumnal dish but it was so comforting that I'd happily eat it no mater what the time of year.

Pasta with Tomato Sauce

Yesterday I decided not to watch the football.  Using man logic, I realised that I had missed all of England's goals during Euro 2012 for one reason or an other.  Not watching would guarantee England victory against Italy right?  Wrong.  Perhaps it was the fact that I listened to the game and therefore would have heard the goal that scuppered England.  Perhaps it was England's woeful record at scoring penalties.  Perhaps it was Rooney's new haircut ruining his aerodynamics.  Perhaps it was none of these things.  It did mean that I got some time on my own in the kitchen.

One of the ingredients on my shopping list for the mezze on Saturday was tomatoes.  I clearly hadn't been paying attention at the meal planning stage because I bought a catering pack of salad toms for a quid, only to find out that Z only required four of them for the salad.  I busied myself with knocking up a simple slow cooked tomato sauce.  I decided not to peel them but aesthetically the finished product would have been nicer.

The tomatoes were added to a fried red onion and some garlic and then left alone to collapse into themselves, over a low heat, for a couple of hours.  This really brings out the sweetness of the tomatoes.  In the past we have used the sauce at this stage to cover fish before baking it.  Tonight it has been used as a pasta sauce.  Oregano, basil and a little chilli were added along with a handful of chopped olives and the dish was finished with parmesan.  This was so good that for once Z finished her plate before I did.

Penne with Courgettes

This dish, for a few years now, has heralded the start of courgette season on the allotment.  Since growing our own courgettes (and struggling with gluts) we have stopped buying them.  This means that if we ever grow too many in one season, by the time the next season is underway we are ready for more.

This is such a simple recipe that we have used the theory for other vegetables but there is something about the courgette version that makes us come back time after time.  With a little know how and some skill with a knife it is possible to cut the courgettes so that they resemble the quills of penne*.

The courgettes are simply fried in olive oil with some garlic, dried chilli and a scattering of dried tomatoes.  Cooked penne is then added with a little of the cooking water and more olive oil.  That's it, it really couldn't be simpler.  To me there aren't many dishes that taste more of summer than this one, all we need now is some sunshine.

*Top tip from Mr Jamie Oliver

Pasta con pollo

Last night's kedjenou was a roaring success.  The chicken was perfectly cooked and there was so much flavour in the vegetables that, for once, there was no need to add herbs and spices to the couscous.  The one slight problem was the portion size.  Put simply, I had cooked far too much! 

I had cooked two chicken legs, one each for Z and I, but I hadn't taken into account their size until I dished up.  The legs were huge.  I wouldn't have liked to bump into the chicken that they'd belonged to.  It would have been like something from Family Guy, only I'm not quite as portly as Peter Griffin and the chicken wouldn't have been the same height as me.  Between us Z and I only managed to eat one leg, which left us with another meal worth of chicken.

For tonight's meal Z raided the fridge and found some tinned tomatoes, mushrooms and a pepper that wanted eating.  Everything was simmered together for a couple of hours until it turned into a rich ragu and finished with lots of fresh thyme.  The sauce was served with pasta and plenty of parmesan cheese and was delicious.

Pasta with Broccoli

After all of the beef we managed to consume over the course of the last week, its no surprise that we're having a couple of vegetarian days.  We often make pasta dishes with broccoli but tonight is a new one.  I happened to catch one of Jamie Oliver's Meals in 30 Minutes a few weeks ago and was intrigued with his take on the dish, so I decided to give it a try.

At it's heart, it is very similar to how I would have cooked the dish; anchovies, garlic and dried chilli fried in olive oil and then mixed through cooked pasta and broccoli.  The main difference is the use of the broccoli stalk.  This gets blended with the other sauce ingredients in a food processor to make a paste.  The paste is then fried off, adding a little of the pasta water every couple of minutes to stop it from catching.  The broccoli florets are cooked with the pasta and stirred through the cooked sauce.  The inclusion of the broccoli stalk adds a nice depth of flavour and saves on food waste.  I'll be cooking this again, thank you Mr Oliver.

Pasta with Chard

Technically we are the proud tenders of an allotment and a vegetable garden.  We almost lost the allotment last year due to the weeds outnumbering the plants in a staggering fashion.  Previously we had managed to convince ourselves that we were keeping an area of the plot "wild" to encourage friendly insects, but it had got out of hand.

Our plot is now being tended by a couple of Z's colleagues.  Next year R will be big enough to cause all kinds of mischief on the plot and we'll pick up our trowels again.  To keep us in the habit of eating our own we converted the front garden into a veg patch.  It is little more than 2m by 3m but last year it kept us in salad leaves and runner beans for the summer. This year we have managed to plant nothing.  All that we now have growing is the rekindled rocket and Swiss Chard that we planted this time last year.

The rocket has turned up in a few meals already but the chard has just come into its own.  I really love chard, it may well be my favourite vegetable.  Two veggies for the price of one.  The tender leaves that cook like spinach and the thick stems, which have a slightly beetrooty, earthy sweetness to them.

For tonight's menu I simply fried the stems in olive oil with some garlic, anchovies and dried chilli.  Once cooked, but still with a bite, I added some cooked pasta, the shredded leaves and a handful of parmesan and after a brief stir the meal was cooked and served.  As quick evening meals go this is one of the tastiest.  Sadly, there isn't much chard in the garden, but we'll eke it out to make sure we can have some again this year.