Creamy Kale Pasta

Last week we received a gorgeous bunch of kale in our box. I was in the mood for something creamy and warming for a chilly winter night. But, I also wanted in include something fresh and use leftovers! How to manage? Below is my creamy kale pasta recipe as a result.

Ingredients

25g butter
2 cloves of minced garlic
2 chopped spring onions
1 bunch of kale, washed and roughly chopped
1/3 cup pure cream
1/2 can of condensed tomato soup
Leftover roast chicken
Smoked paprika and pepper to taste
1/2 lime's worth of juice
Cup of grape tomatoes
Parmesan cheese



Method
Saute garlic and the whites of the spring onions in butter. Add kale and simmer for a few minutes.


Add tomato soup, cream and shredded leftover chicken (or any other protein). Simmer for another few minutes, add paprika & pepper.


Slowly add lime juice and stir.


At this point you can just serve it up on pasta with some cheese. But, as I said above, I wanted to add a little freshness...


...Chop up grape tomatoes into halves...


...Serve with the greens of the spring onions.


Even better, leftover sauce can be spooned into puff pastry triangles the next night, brushed with egg and cooked in a 180 degree oven for 30 minutes for a delicious snack. Served here with hot sauce!

Mediterranean Roasted Vegetables with Haloumi

Morgan made scrumptious roast harvest vegetables for me last week. He was inspired by this recipe. We made it with BBQ steak, but it would work beautifully as a stand-alone dish. I've never eaten roast broccoli before, but it was truly delicious and very different to the more familiar steamed broccoli we eat.



4 cups broccoli crowns, trimmed and cut into bite-size florets
1 cup baby tomatoes
1 green capsicum sliced
1 baby eggplant sliced
1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
2 cloves garlic, minced
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon freshly grated lemon zest
1 tablespoon lemon juice
10 pitted black olives, sliced
1 teaspoon dried oregano
2 teaspoons capers, rinsed

4 slices haloumi



Toss broccoli, tomatoes, eggplant, green pepper, oil, garlic and salt in a large bowl until evenly coated. Spread in an even layer on a baking sheet. Bake until the broccoli begins to brown, 10 to 13 minutes.



Combine lemon zest and juice, olives, oregano and capers (if using) in a large bowl. Add the roasted vegetables; stir to combine. Serve with slices of fried haloumi.

Spagetti Bolognese

Wow! Look at my Food Connect box this week. What a crazy amount of delicious food. Yummo.

After a long day on Friday I came home to find Morgan had made fresh pasta. he had seen all our tomatoes and decided to make bolognese!




Fresh pasta

6 eggs
Approx. 550g plain flour (fine flour if you have it)
1 tsp salt

Makes 8 serves

Morgan's method is precise (as always). He says: Knead the crap out of it until it goes 'delish' (approx. 5-min). You will notice that the dough transitions from a thing made out of flour and eggs, to a cohesive, moldable, tangible stuff. When it does that, keep kneading for a bit and put it aside for 1/2 hour minimum. Roll out using a pasta roller into flat sheets, lay them out to dry for a bit, then feed them through a pasta maker to make spaghetti!


Hang the strands to dry on your foldable laundry thingie!

Bolognese sauce

Cook 1kg mince until liquid is gone. Add 1/2 cup wine and cook until the liquid is gone. Add 4 cloves garlic, 3 finely chopped onion & olive oil. Cook, but don't brown the onions. Add Italian herbs and a couple of bay leaves (I threw in some rosemary too). Add 1kg fresh tomatoes + 2 cans of chopped tomatoes blended.



Bring to the boil and then simmer for 1.5hrs with the lid off. We added a little tomato paste 1 tbsp brown sugar, some balsamic vinegar and salt to taste. It's a process of adjusting flavours to suit the palate.


Serve over fresh pasta (3min in boiling water).


I added some Barambuh fetta, spring onions and chopped olives to serve.

When I grew up in Sydney in the 1980s, we ate 'spag bol' quite often. I remember the Parmesan cheese from a long-life can sprinkled on top and the crappy boxed pasta underneath. I love the emotions and memories that come from smell. Cooking this dish certainly takes me straight back to my youth. Not a huge surprise because smell is the only sense to connect directly to consciousness without being mediated by the thalamus. Thus, our experiences and memories are most quickly retrieved through smell. For more on olfaction see my memory blog entries on olfaction.