courgette and pasta bake

We make this recipe (or a variation on it) fairly often, and it involves far too long standing over the cooker in a cold kitchen (the hole in the wall is being mended tomorrow – hurrah!). So in the interests of experimentation, I thought I’d have a bash at doing the sauce in the little slow cooker.

I diced onion, crushed garlic and chopped courgettes, and put them in the slow cooker with a glug of olive oil, and another of red wine. Left them on low for a couple of hours, then added a tin of chopped tomatoes, salt, pepper, and chilli flakes, then left it for another couple of hours And it was really nice,  but I should have turned it up to high for the last hour, I think, just to get the last of the slightly raw tomato taste to it (I cannot abide raw tomatoes).

Did the pasta on the hob as usual, then dumped the lot in the small Remoska, and dotted it with mozzarella and basil leaves.

Worth mentioning that courgettes are lovely veg – dice them up small and include in soup or casseroles, cut them into strips for a nice stir fry, bung them in roast veg …

Mirrored from Reactive Cooking.

determination

Squib likes to get on the kitchen worktops. She’s been doing this via the kitchen stool (positioned under the ovens, so dead handy for killing the teatowels too), and this morning I moved it, so she couldn’t make the leap from stool to counter.

It was quite entertaining to see her leap on the stool, realise she couldn’t make it, then get down on the floor, and realise she couldn’t make it from there either. Rinse and repeat about ten times.

Then she worked out that if she went via the wicker baskets and the cat bikkit bin, she could come through straight onto the worktop. So she did. Several times. We put her on the floor. We squirted her with water. She was not deterred.

She made a huge effort and managed to claw her way up a cupboard. Then she had another go from the stool. She made a leap for it, and clawed her way up the oven glove, and planted her flag on the top of Mount KitchenCounter, triumphantly.

We do not like her getting on the kitchen worktops. But I don’t see that there’s any way we can prevent it now.

Piranha theme tune: “Don’t Stop Me Now, I’m Having Such a Good Time”.

Mirrored from the Tribe.