Vegetable Marzetti

I set out to make something I thought the kids would eat, since we're all just getting our appetites back and have tender tummies. When I started eating it I realised it was pretty much Marzetti but with veges instead of meat.

I cooked the pasta and then stirred the sauce through. To make the sauce I literally just put all these ingredients in a pan: can of tomatoes, diced onion, crushed garlic, salt, pepper, peas, grated carrot, chicken stock cube (so technically not vegetarian), tomato paste, water. I let that reduce down for a bit then added cheese.

It was great. But would probably be nicer if you took the time to saute onions and garlic and be thoughtful about your other ingredients as well. But as it was, chucking it all in worked pretty well too.

Midnight Spaghetti 7 (with a twist...)

I added sliced and diced ham, white wine vinegar and "Cream for Cooking" (a new product, thank you James at The Food Show for the free samples!) to the sauce, and omitted the chili. It was nice, but I was FAR too heavy handed with the cream!

Lasagna

Sorry, no photo, I knew I said I wouldn't do this anymore, but just in case any of you really care to know, I won't be posting for the next week because we're going away. But we're taking a lasagna that will last us around 3 days, so there's something for you. Back to posting (semi) regularly again in a week!

Tomato and Basil Spaghetti 6

Still good on the third day :).

Spaghetti Pie

This is a good one. A friend made it for Erika post-partum baby #2 a year and a half ago, and I happened to be in the right place at the right time. It's been included in my family meal arsenal ever since. Don't give it a miss just because it's a bad photo.

Spaghetti Pie

500-600g Vermicelli

50-75g butter

2 small/1 large egg

1/4 cup grated parmesan cheese

250g cottage cheese

Prepared tomato sauce

Grated cheese

Cook your vermicelli in salted water (I used regular spaghetti in the photo above. But vermicelli is just so much nicer for this). Cook your tomato sauce how you like it (mine: oil, onion, garlic, mince, mushrooms, Worcestershire sauce, beef stock, salt, pepper, dried mixed herbs, canned tomatoes, tomato paste). When vermicelli is cooked, drain and immediately put in the butter, egg and parmesan cheese and stir to mix. Press the vermicelli into a dish, cover with the cottage cheese, then the tomato sauce, then the grated cheese on top. Bake in oven till heated through.

Pasta Salad 2

My secret to a good pasta salad: Paul Newman's Balsamic vinaigrette. I use that and mayonnaise as my dressing and it always turns out well. I just throw in whatever pasta I have on hand, anything else that looks like it could work, and stir through the gold. But actually another tip I have is to stir through little cubes of cheese and eat the salad warm. Some cheese will be melted and some not and it's just a nice surprise every now and again while you're eating it to get a little cheesy bite.

What's in this salad? Penne - cooked; oil, onion, garlic, ham, mushrooms, salt, pepper - all fried in a pan; tomatoes, spring onions, cheese - all fresh/raw/uncooked; corn - cooked separately, mayonnaise and Paul Newman's Balsamic vinaigrette. Delicious!

Penne with Peas

A variant of Midnight Spaghetti tonight worked well.

Oil, shallots, garlic, salt and pepper in pan as usual. Skip the chili, add rosemary and butter instead. After a few minutes add some cream (1/4 cup maybe) and stir to combine. Add peas and then cooked penne. Yum! It was nice and subtle, and really good.

The kids loved it and ate it really well, the penne is perfect for little hands and they've always loved peas.

This 'n' That and Lasagna

My friend Johanna recently reminisced that one of her favourite dinners growing up was what her mother called "This 'n' That": a plateful of leftovers and whatever was left in the kitchen pretty much. This is what the kids had for dinner,

(broccoli, water, yoghurt, peaches, cracker, rehydration liquid for Sadie. She got pretty sick)

(Sadie finishing off a piece of cheese)

(the reject bowl: spaghetti, for the 4th(?) evening this week (the meatballs got eaten), banana, peeled pear, plum)

because the main event wasn't ready in time.

This is the first lasagna we've made at this house, so that's AT LEAST 6 months! It was so good!

But I overdid it with the cream.

Cream in the lasagna? Oh yes we did! After it's all assembled (with uncooked pasta) we bake for 10 min, pour over cream, 10 min more, more cream, 10 min more, more cream, 10 minutes more. Well those were my instructions from Nat. He normally does the "creaming". But I didn't fully understand his description of how much cream to put in. So after baptising the lasagna (by immersion) after the first 1o minutes it took another 40 minutes for the cream to absorb. Or look like it was absorbed.

Lasagna with your cream anyone?

Spaghetti and Meatballs 5

Sorry about the lack of posting recently. We haven't really been eating anything original is the thing. But I thought I'd better post something so here's what we had tonight.

Remember, the best ever meatballs recipe is Rachael Ray's. Give it a whirl.

Midnight Spaghetti 6 (with a twist...)

I added to our classic recipe tonight about 200g of tinned tuna in oil (with the oil), fresh tomatoes (quartered or eigthed) and fresh basil. It cooked up a treat! (Nat wasn't eating with us because of work etc. so I was spared any bad feedback)

If making it again I would add a squeeze of lemon juice just to finish it off. Yum!

Tuna Casserole

250g penne or other dried pasta

5 eggs

200g tinned tuna in oil (or thereabouts, whatever you've got will do. I forgot to check the can for weight and now it's out of the house)

1 cup corn kernels (from frozen, canned or fresh)

1/3-1/2 cup mayonnaise

1 capful Paul Newman's balsamic vinaigrette

Boil your pasta and eggs. Slice the eggs and add everything to a bowl and stir to mix. Add a crumb topping and gill if you'd like, or eat warm or cold as a pasta salad.

Crumb topping

2 pieces bread

Salt

Lemon pepper seasoning

Whizz bread in a blender and add seasonings to taste. Spoon pasta salad into ovenproof dish and sprinkle over top. Grill until golden.

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As you can see my crumb topping got a little bit darker than "golden". I thought this was SUPER good, the kids liked it pretty well, and Nat ate it but didn't like it because he doesn't like tuna or eggs (generally). So it was a success I think! I definitely liked it enough to make it again, and it was really quick and easy.

Spaghetti and Meatballs 4

Spaghetti and courgette meatballs - after making the stuffed courgette the other night I had tons of leftover filling and froze a tray full of meatballs. They didn't turn out the best, because courgette flesh that I'd included in the meatball mix became watery as they were cooked and so a few fell apart. But other than that it was a good meal.

The sauce tonight: a large splash of olive oil, 2 onions, 4 cloves garlic, 1 can tomatoes, 1 beef stock cube dissolved in 3/4 can of water, salt, pepper, generous shake of worcestershire sauce, 2 pinches dried sweet basil.

It turned out quite nice! A little bit different than what I normally make for a tomato pasta sauce.

Stuffed courgette with spaghetti

This was ok, I'd make it again, but no one else in the family liked it. It's not good enough to post the recipe. The kids just ate the meat out and left the courgettes and most of the spaghetti.

Tomato and Basil Spaghetti 5

Look familiar? What's one of your old trusty go to's?

Marzetti

Correct me if I'm wrong, but is Marzetti just some sort of pasta with a tomato sauce, mince and cheese? That's what my upbringing has told me.

Marzetti

500g macaroni pasta

1 Tbsp oil

2 onions (finely chopped)

5 cloves garlic (minced)

300-500g mince

2 x 420g (ish?) chopped tomatoes

1/2 can water

1 oxo beef stock cube

1 Tbsp soy sauce

1 Tbsp Worcestershire sauce

1 tsp salt

A few cracks of pepper

1 cup grated cheese

Heat oil in a saucepan. Cook onions and garlic. Add mince and brown. Add the rest of the ingredients and simmer until thick. Cook pasta. Stir the grated cheese through the pasta and then pour over the sauce (I used most of the sauce, all but about 1 cup). Stir until well mixed and the cheese is all melted and making the sauce nice and cheesy. You want it to be the consistency of mac and cheese, not that cheesy, but not too saucy.

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Addendum: Turns out it's Marzetti not Marsetti. Check out my sister's comment and link on this post if you want more info. (And why not click through to her blog too? It's great)

Tomato and Basil Spaghetti 4

Good ol' trusty. I had wholemeal, everyone else regular. Lately I overcook my wholemeal spaghetti by about two minutes over what the packet says. It's way better that way I reckon.

Pumpkin Penne

... aka "Experimental pasta #2 (or 3. Maybe 4, 5 or 6.)".

Trying to make something quick and easy, I thought I'd use a can of pumpkin soup as a quick pasta sauce.

I chopped two kransy's and fried them up. I started my penne boiling. In another pot I emptied the can of soup, added 3 Tbsp of both sour cream and cream cheese and about 6 Tbsp of milk. Stir as it heats until smooth. I added a pinch of both paprika and nutmeg.

At the last minute I decided some green in the salad might look nice so microwaved some peas and added fresh basil leaves as well as the sauce and kransy's. Stir to mix. Top with parmesan cheese.

I cooked half of a 500g packet of penne and used half the pot of sauce that I'd made. It tasted fine, the kids liked it, BUT, if you're going to make something similar skip the peas and basil. Add way more kransky (it's really the star of the dish) and parmesan. Toasted pine nuts would be a welcome addition too.

After all that I found something in the fridge that would have been much faster.

Doh.

Midnight Spaghetti 5 (with a twist...)

Tonight I made midnight spaghetti with a few variations:

Wholemeal Spaghetti

The kids always want to try mine when I serve myself the wholemeal and they have regular so I cooked it up for everyone tonight. It seemed to go down just as well as regular spaghetti with them (don't worry Nat I won't do it all the time because I know wholemeal is more expensive).

Kransky Octopuses

Someone I read (also a friend/relative [if you can have a sister-in-law twice removed]) suggested these through a comment on the blog. Almost every comment effects what I cook, so get commenting. Thanks Mika! I decided on these after looking in my fridge for veges that I could add, after Rachel's suggestion, but we didn't have any I thought were suitable. We did have Kransky's though!

Cream Cheese

I figured Kransky's are cheesy so I added cream cheese to the pan after the spaghetti to try and make it a creamy sauce. It tasted fine but if you want to try it I suggest adding the cream cheese to your sauce/frypan before the spaghetti so that it gets all melted and mixed well first.

Spaghetti and Meatballs 3

I made Rachael Ray's Meatballs again with Ruth Pretty's Tomato Pasta Sauce. I think the Sauce is a keeper. Click on through and take a look.

- I used two cans of chopped tomatoes instead of 14-18 fresh tomatoes. In the future I may use whole peeled tomatoes. You definitely get a different result depending on how you prepare your tomatoes, but it's SO much easier to just open a can and tip it in.

- I didn't have bay leaves. I'm sure the flavour would be a bit different if I did. I used basil a little differently than the recipe calls for.

- I may have over-reduced the sauce.

Midnight Spaghetti 4

We had the same old midnight spaghetti tonight. But I've included photos from over Christmas when my siblings and I and our families all gathered at my parents place. This is what midnight spaghetti for 19 people looks like.

Tim (brother-in-law) is stirring the enormous pasta pot. Nat is stirring the shrimp in the frypan. We had to tip the shrimp/shallots into the pasta pot because I don't think there is a frypan in the world that could hold all the pasta we needed.

A frypan full of shrimp and deep with oil. At this point we didn't know if we had the increased amounts of everything right. How often do you multiply your recipes by 10?

The pasta pot. Can't see much through the steam but it was big and full. Immense amounts of spaghetti.

Ready to serve. Looks the same as usual...

The pasta pot on the table so you can get an idea of scale.

On the plate. Just like at home. It was great.