Truly Scrumptious

Pasta Sauce

I like to make pasta sauces in advance – they are a great way of using up leftover vegetables, and can be really economic to make if you have a supermarket that offers misshapen or odd veggies at a lower price e.g. The Odd Bunch. If you have children, they won’t notice how many veggies are in the sauce because it will taste so good and also be very nutritious. My sauces tend to be red or green and both go really well with pasta. The red sauce is tomato based and great for meatballs (or Bolognese if you add mince to it), but it is equally nice on its own. The green sauce goes really nicely with fish and pasta, I tend to add some cooked salmon or crab to the green sauce and serve it with a nice penne or fusilli pasta.

FOR THE RED SAUCE
2 stalks of celery chopped (leftover celery freezes really well, chop it up and place portions into zip seal bags)
1 onion chopped
2 cloves of garlic chopped
1 fresh red chilli chopped (or a teaspoon of chilli paste)
1 jar of passata
2 teaspoons of vegetable stock powder
Mixed herbs (dried, fresh or in a tube) – use whichever herbs you like, I used a large teaspoon of mixed dried herbs
Salt and pepper to season
Optional: tomato paste, sun dried tomatoes, capers, olives, roasted capsicum in a jar – this is great for using up all of those half used jars in the fridge.
Any veggies, for the sauce in the picture I used: 1 zucchini, 1 sweet potato, 3 large mushrooms, and half a red capsicum. You can also use eggplant, squash, carrots, cauliflower, swede, fresh tomatoes – anything that you have lying around will work. Chop all of the veggies into small pieces and keep the hard veg separate from the softer veg as it will take longer to cook.

METHOD
Using approx 2-3 tablespoons of oil (olive or vegetable), fry the onion, celery, chilli and garlic for a minute.
Add the hard vegetables e.g. carrot, swede, sweet potato, zucchini, squash.
After approx 5 minutes, add the soft vegetables and the passata. Add the herbs, vegetable stock powder and seasonings and continue to cook until all of the vegetables are soft and a little mushy.
Using a stick blender or food processor, whizz up the vegetables into a smooth sauce. When dividing portions for the freezer, 500ml of sauce is a good portion size for two people. Taste and adjust the seasoning to suit your taste.

FOR THE GREEN SAUCE
2 stalks of celery chopped (leftover celery freezes really well, chop it up and place portions into zip seal bags)
1 onion chopped
2 cloves of garlic chopped
2 teaspoons of vegetable stock powder
3 tablespoons of yoghurt, coconut cream, cashew cream, sour cream, ricotta or coconut yoghurt
Mixed herbs (dried, fresh or in a tube) – use whichever herbs you like, I used a large teaspoon of mixed dried herbs
Salt and pepper to season
Any green veggies, for the sauce in the picture I used: 1 zucchini, 1 head of broccoli, 1 large mushroom (okay it’s not green but I wanted to use it up), and a bunch of broccolini. You can also use kale, spinach, swede, green capsicum, yellow capsicum, cauliflower, green cabbage – again, anything that you have lying around that is predominantly green or yellow will work. Chop all of the veggies into small pieces and keep the hard veg separate from the softer veg as it will take longer to cook. You can also use any edible stems and leaves, just chop the stems a bit smaller e.g. broccoli stems.

METHOD
Using approx 2-3 tablespoons of oil (olive or vegetable), fry the onion, celery, chilli and garlic for a minute.
Add the hard vegetables e.g. zucchini, swede, broccoli.
After approx 5 minutes, add the soft vegetables. Add the herbs, vegetable stock powder and seasonings and continue to cook until all of the vegetables are soft and a little mushy.
Add the yoghurt, cream or ricotta. You may also need to add some water if the consistency is too thick.
Using a stick blender or food processor, whizz up the vegetables into a smooth sauce. When dividing portions for the freezer, 500ml of sauce is a good portion size for two people. Taste and adjust the seasoning to suit your taste.
If you wish to cook crab pasta for example, heat the sauce, prepare the pasta in a separate pot. When the pasta is almost cooked add approx 100g of cooked crab per person to the sauce, heat through for a few minutes, then drain the pasta and combine the sauce with the pasta.

VBW Pasta

We recently stayed in a holiday apartment in Spain, and it can be quite a mission to make tasty home cooked food without buying hundreds of condiments from the local supermarket.
This is a simple pasta that we made without cooking oil, and it was enough to serve four people. It also took just 4 ingredients from the local supermarket: a jar of mixed antipasti (eggplant, capsicum and onion), a jar of napoletana sauce, some sliced hot chorizo, and some pasta.

First we started to cook the pasta in boiling salted water. Then we cooked the chorizo on a low heat to render some of the fat. We chopped the antipasti and added it, then poured in the napoletana sauce. Once the pasta was cooked, we drained it and added it to our hotchpotch of sauce and mixed well. It was really tasty and didn’t cost the earth.