Category Archives: Sides

Warm pasta, broccoli & bean salad with lemon, garlic and basil

2014-03-25 19.20.23
I love a warm salad.  The flavours are so much stronger when the dish is at room temperature rather than chilled, and partly cooking the ingredients allows each individual ingredient to shine.
This is such a delicious and healthy supper, we all really enjoy it and it’s a complete one pot meal so perfect for busy week night dinners.

Warm pasta, broccoli & bean salad with lemon, garlic and basil
 
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Author:
Recipe type: Warm salad
Cuisine: Italian
Serves: 4-6
Ingredients
  • A splash of water / stock
  • 350g wholemeal pasta – rigatoni, penne etc.
  • 1 smallish red onion, halved, then finely sliced
  • 2 large garlic cloves, finely chopped or microplaned
  • ½ tsp fine sea salt
  • 1 can / 250g cooked cannellini beans
  • 1 heaped tsp freshly grated / microplaned lemon zest
  • 2 tablespoons lemon juice
  • 6 medium tomatoes, cored and chopped
  • 1 large head of broccoli, cut into small florets
  • Large bunch of basil, finely shredded
  • 1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
  • A dozen or so Kalamata olives, to serve
Instructions
  1. Put pasta on to boil.
  2. Steam the broccoli until just tender, about 6-7 mins. Once cooked, run under cold running water to refresh and retain colour.
  3. Put the onion, garlic and salt in a large heavy bottomed casserole with your choice of sautéing medium, mix thoroughly, and warm through on a low light for 5 minutes – do not COOK! The idea is to take the rawness out of the garlic but leave the onion still with some bite.
  4. Add a splash or two of vegetable stock as required to keep it moist but without stewing it.
  5. Add the beans, lemon juice and zest and continue to warm through for another few minutes.
  6. Add tomatoes, balsamic vinegar and keep on a low light whilst waiting for the pasta to cook. Once ingredients are all hot but not cooked, remove from the heat and tip into a large wide salad bowl along with the broccoli.
  7. Once pasta is cooked, tip into the bowl along with the basil and mix thoroughly. Allow to sit for 5-10 minutes for the flavours to mingle.
  8. Top with olives and serve.

 

Kale Stuffed Potatoes

This is more of concept than a recipe so quantities are a bit vague.  Anyway, this is what I do:

Bake 4 large baking potatoes in the oven on a baking tray (I put a metal skewer through each one which speeds up the cooking – don’t bother microwaving – you know it’s not the same!) and bake for a good hour – hour and a half depending on their size and your oven.

Whilst they’re baking boil or steam a smallish bunch of kale until tender then chop finely, and steam-fry a finely chopped medium onion.

Make sure they’re soft and fluffy all the way through before halving them lengthwise, and across the widest part so they will sit flat on the plate without wobbling.

Scoop all that soft fluffy potato out into a bowl, leaving a thin shell that helps the potato keep some sort of integrity and not collapse in a heap.

Add whatever you like to add to your potatoes to mash – we use creamy soy milk, (low fat), houmous, salt and pepper, nooch etc, mash thoroughly, then stir in your onions and kale until really well combined.

Pile this filling back into  your potato shells place back on the baking tray and bake for another 15 minutes or so or until you can’t wait any longer.  Mmmmmmm.

NB: I will add a photo to this post when I remember not to eat them all so quickly…

Tomato Soup and Kale Stuffed Potatoes

I’ve decided to post most days now and share not just my own recipes but things I find online, from books etc and musings on our food in general.  🙂

I’m making a concerted effort now to simplify weeknight meals.  I have a tendency to get all excited when I’m making my weekly meal plan and then after a day at my desk stumble into the kitchen, when at 6:30 pm that list of delicious dishes is looking rather overwhelming.  SO, I have decided to keep anything very unfamiliar or challenging to the weekend (well, Fri, Sat and Sun) and keep Mon-Thurs of the easy or “done it a million times” variety.

My kids love Heinz tomato soup so I’ve been trying to find a substitute that doesn’t send you into a diabetic coma or sculling a litre of water along with it due to all that sugar and salt.  I found this one online but can I find it now?  Typing in the exact title only takes me to MyFitnessPal where it’s listed as a caloric total someone once added, but no recipe.   Anyway it was called Not Your Campbell’s Cream of Tomato Soup.  I amended it a fair bit anyway, but if you find it, that’s the original source. And thank you whoever you are, it was delicious.
Rather than just having it with bread, I decided to serve it with baked potatoes, this time stuffed with steamed kale.  We love something we call “Stuffily Brocked Potatoes” (due to saying it wrong one day – should have been “Broccoli Stuffed Potatoes”!) so thought I’d ring the changes, and find another way to get the awesome kale into the offspring and the result was perhaps even better.  We also had some good wholemeal sourdough (this is our favourite) and a simple cos lettuce salad on the side.

Potato recipe to follow in next post… 🙂

Tomato Soup
 
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A knock off of that tinned soup, but so much better for you .
Author:
Recipe type: Soup
Cuisine: British
Serves: 4
Ingredients
  • 5 cups water
  • 2 cups diced sweet potato
  • 2 cups diced tomatoes (no need to peel)
  • 1 very small onion (e.g. golf ball), diced
  • 1 tsp dried thyme
  • ½ tsp ground coriander
  • ½ tsp garlic powder
  • pinch of salt
  • ½ cup raw cashews
  • 150g tomato paste
  • 1 tblspn nutritional yeas
  • 1 tblspn agave syrup
  • 1 tsp salt - or to taste
  • black pepper, to taste
Instructions
  1. Put water, sweet potato, tomatoes, onion, thyme, coriander, garlic powder, salt and cashew nuts into a large saucepan and bring to the boil.
  2. Reduce heat and simmer until potatoes are tender - about 15 minutes.
  3. Add tomato paste, yeast, and syrup and blend with immersion blender until smooth and creamy. Leave to simmer for longer if nuts need a little more time to soften completely and then blend again.

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