Vegetable garden pasta

The summer holidays are over for now and returning to work has been fairly painful as always. But the good thing is that I still have loads of veggies to harvest from my balcony and can make fresh weekday meals with them, like this humble vegetable garden pasta dish. All veggies in this recipe are home grown by me apart from the onion and garlic. I really like my flat summer squashes or courgettes this year. They look cute and make a nice addition to many dishes. Same goes for the chillies. It's an incredibly satisfying feeling cooking with mainly own produce. Late summer is so great going over to my favourite season autumn!

Have a look at the recipe below.

Ingredients

1 onion

2 garlic cloves

1 red pepper

2 small pattypan squashes

2 small chillies

4 tomatoes

Olive oil for frying

Salt to taste

Black pepper to taste

Fresh basil leaves

Fresh courgette flowers

Grated cheese for sprinkling on the top

300 g fresh regular and spinach strozzapreti pasta

Method

Chop the vegetables into small pieces and cook them in olive oil in a hot pan for a few minutes. They should be a little bit cooked, yet still firm. Season the mix with salt, pepper and basil.

Boil the pasta until al dente and combine it with the veggies.

Sprinkle the fresh courgette flowers and cheese on the top and enjoy.

I'm sharing this recipe with Chris at Thinly Spread blog and the Pasta Please! cooking challenge.

Have a wonderful weekend!

Your VegHog

Hedgehog porcini ravioli & Hedgehog Awareness Week

Hedgehog Awareness Week has started once again, and it would be great if each and every one of us could do at least one small thing during the week to raise hedgehog awareness or directly help hedgehogs. If you have a garden, leave a shallow bowl of water out and make sure that there's a gap in your fence so that hedgehogs can access your garden. Read for more hints and tips how to help the spiny creatures on the webpage of the British Hedgehog Preservation Society. 

I've had a tradition now for a few years to make hedgehog shaped ravioli for the hedgehog week, and this year was no different. This time I made brown pasta dyed with dried porcini mushrooms with earthy porcini filling. I thought I'd keep everything else simple and let the mushroom flavour be the star of the dish. This worked out very nicely and all hogs held together during the boiling!

Have a look at my recipe:

Ingredients

Pasta:

200 g pasta flour

2 eggs

1 tsp salt

15 g dried porcini mushrooms

Filling:

15 g dried porcini mushrooms

1 onion

2 garlic cloves

30 g grated vegetarian pasta cheese

3 tbsp breadcrumbs

Sprinkle of salt

Sprinkle of ground black pepper

Handful of fresh basil leaves

Served with:

Basil and garlic infused olive oil

Lambs lettuce

Method

Soak all dried porcini mushrooms (15 g + 15 g) in water for about 30 minutes. Drain them, but save the porcini water and purée the mushrooms into a smooth paste. Take the half to use in the pasta dough.

Knead the dough ingredients together and let the dough rest in the fridge for one hour. Add some of the porcini water to the dough, if needed. You can also add it to moisten and flavour the filling later.

Chop the onion and garlic for the filling finely and fry them in little olive oil until soft. Mix all ingredients for the filling together.

Then roll the pasta out. Make thin sheets with a pasta machine, cut the ravioli into shapes and fill them.

Cook in salt water for a few minutes and serve.

I would like to share this pasta recipe with Pasta Please vegetarian pasta cooking challenge, which is hosted this month by Chris from Thinly Spread and co-hosted by Jacqueline from Tinned Tomatoes.

Have a wonderful Hedgehog Awareness Week!

Your VegHog

Pasta with pea shoot and baby leaf pesto and sundried tomatoes

The weather in England today is so nicely warm and sunny. People in the Nordic countries are celebrating Midsummer in not so warm conditions, but I wish you all a nice Midsummer nevertheless.

Pasta with pesto is pretty much perfect summer food for me. Throw a tomato and mozzarella salad on the side and it can be close to heaven. Pesto is so incredible as it can be made from so many different summer greens, and this time I chose to use pea shoots and baby leaves. I added some sundried tomatoes, fresh basil, hazelnuts and vegetarian pasta cheese to the dish and here's my recipe.

Pea shoot and baby leaf pesto:

90 g mixed baby leaves and pea shoots

1 garlic clove

4-6 tbsp olive oil

10 g pine nuts

Other ingredients:

10 sundried tomatoes

1 tsp olive oil

Fresh basil

Handful of hazelnuts

Vegetarian pasta cheese

Amori pasta

Method:

First make the pea shoot and baby leaf pesto by puréeing all the ingredients together. Then the pesto can wait in the fridge for the rest to be made.

Cut the sundried tomatoes into smaller pieces and soak them in water for about 10 minutes.

Cut the hazelnuts in halves and roast them in the oven until the flavour are released.

Briefly cook the sundried tomatoes in olive oil in a pan and add the basil and hazelnuts.

Make shavings from the vegetarian pasta cheese.

Cook the pasta until it's al dente and then mix it with the tomatoes, nuts and pesto. 

This is how my summerly pesto pasta dish is done and I want to share it with two cooking challenges. Firstly due to its greenness, I'm sharing this recipe with this month's Eat Your Greens challenge by Shaheen from A2K - A Seasonal Veg Table. 

I also want to add this to this month's Pasta Please challenge, which is a cooking challenge by Jacqueline from Tinned Tomatoes and hosted this month by BakingQueen74.

Have a nice weekend everyone!

Your VegHog

Hedgehog shaped ravioli with a potato, olive and rosemary filling

This week is Hedgehog Awareness Week and I can't keep saying it enough. Yesterday I already wrote an Old Prickly post, but now I am going to continue with the all important hedgehog theme. I made suitable hedgehog shaped ravioli with a potato, olive and rosemary filling. I have made hedgehog ravioli before, but the potato filling was a first for me. All the components tasted in the mix, so it worked really well and I liked this ravioli version a lot.

As the May theme for The Vegetable Palette challenge is “your favourite vegetable”, I thought I'd share this recipe there as well. The Vegetable Palette is a monthly vegetarian food blogging challenge hosted by Shaheen from A2K - A Seasonal Veg Table. I though long and hard what would be my favourite vegetable, as it constantly changes and there are many, but potatoes are pretty much always up there on the top of my list. They are so versatile, subtle yet tasty and also easy to cook in many shapes and forms. So there you have it, I love potatoes! In this recipe I of course combined them in a way I have never done before, which was also a great experience. 

 

I will also share this recipe with another food blogging challenge, Pasta Please, which is hosted this month by Jen from Jen's Food and created by Jacqueline from Tinned Tomatoes. The theme in May is free, as long as the recipe contains some pasta. 

Here is my recipe for these small prickly beasts and it does make quite an array of them:

Pasta:

400 g grade 00 pasta flour

4 eggs

1 tsp salt

Filling:

500 g potatoes

200 g green olives

Sprinkle of salt

Fresh rosemary leaves

25 g grated mature cheddar

Method

Make the pasta first by kneading the pasta flour, eggs and salt into a firm dough. Let it rest wrapped in a cling film in the fridge for at least one hour.

Boil the peeled potatoes until they are done and mash them. Let the mash cool. Grind the olives into a smooth paste with a mortar and pestle and add them to the mash. Also add the salt, rosemary and little grated cheddar.

Start working the pasta dough thinner and thinner by rolling it through a pasta machine. Once you are happy with the texture and thinness, cut some hedgehog shapes from the dough. Put a little teaspoonful of the potato filling onto a hedgehog shape, brush the edges with water and press it closed with another hedgehog.

Cook the hedgehog ravioli until they are al dente and serve. I served them simply on a bed of salad drizzled with olive oil. Enjoy!

Your VegHog

Fusilli with roasted tomatoes, mozzarella and basil-garlic sauce

Such a pasta dish, like the one I'm sharing with you today, is my go-to dish whenever I want to eat fairly quickly yet tasty or just want to have a lazy weekday meal. Tomato-mozzarella-basil-olive oil is such a winning combination that it's easy to keep it simple. The flavours work well together, the dish is tasty and quick to make – what's not to like?

This is what today's pasta dish consisted of:

Ingredients

300 g mini plum tomatoes

6 tbsp olive oil + some to be drizzled on the top of the ready dish

2 garlic cloves

A bunch of fresh basil leaves

250 g mozzarella

300 g fusilli pasta

Sea salt

I also had some shop bought garlic bread on the side.

Method

Place the whole tomatoes into an oven dish and drizzle olive oil on the top. Roast them at 180-200C for about 10 minutes until they start bursting open.

In the meanwhile boil the pasta in salt water until al dente.

Purée the garlic with the basil leaves and olive oil and set to side. This will be drizzled on top of the dish just before serving.

Tear the mozzarella. Tearing doesn't just look nice on the dish, but it also contains the moisture in the mozzarella.

Serve the pasta with the tomatoes, basil-garlic sauce, mozzarella, little sea salt and good quality olive oil. It's ready to be enjoyed!

I'm sharing this recipe with this month's Pasta Please challenge. Pasta Please is a monthly vegetarian cooking challenge by Tinned Tomatoes blog hosted this month by Knead Whine blog with the theme “dishes that can be on the table in twenty minutes”. I thought that my recipe fits the category, and quite often quick pasta dishes are what I choose to cook after a hectic weekday.

Your VegHog