ramtops

iphone timer

As my regular reader will know, Tuesday night is pasta night. I just open the fridge and concoct something from its contents. For people who don’t have time to cook, here’s a 15-20 minute supper.

Bear in mind I have an ceramic hob, so you can skip the “put the rings on” bit if you’ve got gas.

Switch on the big ring, put a deep frying pan on it, add a slug of olive oil
Switch on the medium ring, put some cold water and salt in a pan, set it on the ring
Slice up a big leek and put it in the pan with the oil.
Weigh out the pasta (if you do such things – we do, because carbs/diabetes)
Slice up some mushrooms, and add to the leeks
Notice pasta water is boiling – add pasta, set timer for ten minutes (this is dried pasta – your pasta may vary)
Remember you haven’t put any garlic in, so quickly peel and chop two cloves and throw them in with the vegetables
Put a colander in the sink for drainage purposes
Grate black pepper into the veg
Open the fridge for some lemon juice, find a bottle of white wine open, and add some of that instead. Too much, so turn up the heat to boil it down a bit
Remove block of feta from fridge and cut up about one third of it
When timer goes, drain pasta then add it to vegetables, together with the feta.
Stir it all together, decant into bowls, scoff.

Mirrored from Reactive Cooking.

We eat a lot of this sort of thing – cheap and tasty. This one started with a tub of lentils from the freezer – no point in cooking just one meals’ worth. I finely diced carrot, red pepper and onion, and some garlic, fried them off, then added some ras el hanouh, and cooked it all through for a couple more minutes.

Then about a mugful of red lentils, and probably three mugs of water (although start with two and check as it goes). Sometimes I put a splash of red wine in; it’s a remarkably versatile base recipe. Bring to a slow boil, and cook for about 40 minutes. That will do us at least four servings, and probably six, depending on how much veg went in it. So that was the lentils.

I sliced an aubergine, put it on a tray covered in tin foil (saves washing up), drizzled with olive oil, and bunged in a gas 8 oven for about half an hour. Made a white sauce (with wholemeal flour – always use that for pretty much everything) while that was going on.

Then into an ovenproof dish: half the lentils, half the aubergines, a layer of spinach, half the white sauce, then the rest of lentils, aubergines, white sauce, and topped with grated parmesan. At least it should have been topped, but I got a bit confused :) and put the parmesan on before the last bit of white sauce. No matter. Baked in a hot oven for about 25 minutes.

This was using up a wrinkly aubergine, some spinach that doesn’t look as though it’s going to last long, and some grated parmesan I bought for our camping trip – I’d normally put feta on top of this.

Mirrored from Reactive Cooking.

Last night was venison burgers brought back from our camping trip, new potatoes and baked beans.

It was meant to be venison burgers with sweet potato wedges and red cabbage, but I ran out of steam when it came to making supper, and just dumped a bag of new spuds in the pot – we’ll use the rest of them in a curry or potato scones or fried with sossidge or, or, or.

And the red cabbage, removed from the freezer in a box labelled “red cabbage”, turned out to be lentils. We felt these wouldn’t really go with burgers, venison or otherwise, so we’ll have them for supper with maybe an aubergine and potato curry (see above!).

Mirrored from Reactive Cooking.

Last night’s supper was already planned, insofar as I knew we needed to use up some of the veg in the fridge, and we’d been eating rice for a few days, so it was time for pasta for a change.

I chopped up a fat leek, a red romano pepper, and several cloves of garlic, and set them to sauté down in some olive oil. Then I went to answer the door, as someone had just knocked. It was a friend from up the road, who wanted to watch himself on the local news (he doesn’t have a television). So we offered him supper.

I added another red pepper, and some strips of pancetta, while Pete grated up lots of parmesan. Boiled some big pasta shells, chopped some sage from the garden, put it all into the pan and served in bowls. Instant supper, and very nice.

Well, we thought so!

Mirrored from Reactive Cooking.

I reviewed the contents of the veg drawer last night - to my shame, there were two small turnips going mouldy, so they had to go. A wide assortment of carrots was hurled into the slow cooker for carrot and coriander soup for lunch today. And there were a lot of green beans.

We like green beans, but we tend to do the same sort of stuff with them every time, and I wanted to try something different, so this is what I did. It was lovely - perfect summer food.

Topped and tailed the beans, and then cut them into chunks of about 2cm. Set them to simmer for about seven minutes, I guess.

Put on some pasta quills to boil.

Got Pete to grate a lot of parmesan, rummaged for the tired half lemon in the fridge, and went and cut some fennel fronds from the garden, which I chopped up small.

Combined beans, pasta, parmesan, black pepper, lemon juice, fennel and some cream, and scoffed from bowls.

Followed it with local strawberries and a home made brownie. Lovely.