Harvest pasta

I call today's dish a harvest pasta as the tomatoes, the bell pepper and the basil come from my own small balcony garden. I posted an update yesterday of what's happening there (have a look here, if you missed it!). It is very satisfying to prepare such a meal. However I feel a little bit bad that I was too lazy and didn't make my own fresh pasta to go with these fine ingredients, because that would've made this dish even better. Well maybe next time, the plants are still very productive, and there's nothing wrong with a quick weekday pasta, is there.

For seasoning of the sauce I used again my sea buckthorn salt. I'm pretty sure, I've mentioned it before, but here's a bit more info. It's slightly pink Himalayan salt seasoned with sea buckthorn berries from the Ostrobothnian west coast in Finland, and it can be used just like regular salt, but it has some health benefits. Remember when I made a post about the Old animals' home in Ylistaro? Anyway, these berry salt products, and much more, are manufactured there at Wanha Markki. When I visited them in August, I obviously had to extend my salt supplies.

And now to the making of this pasta dish. This recipe makes two large pasta bowls.

Ingredients

6 tomatoes

3 garlic cloves

1 large yellow bell pepper

Handful of fresh basil leaves

Olive oil

Sea buckthorn salt (regular salt is also fine)

Ground black pepper

125 g mozzarella

Farfalle pasta

Method

Chop the garlic finely and the tomatoes more coarsely. Heat olive oil in a saucepan and cook the garlic there for a few minutes and then add the tomatoes. Simmer the tomato sauce slowly, for an hour or two until it has reached an intense tomato taste. Season with fresh basil, salt and pepper, once the sauce is pretty much done.

Chop the bell pepper into generous bits and roast them brushed with olive oil in the oven until they are soft and have some roasting marks. I love this method for cooking pepper, they get so insanely sweet in the oven.

Cook the pasta al dente. I used farfalle this time, which isn't normally so frequently used by me, but it's a nice pasta shape. Once the pasta is cooked, mix it into the tomato sauce.

Place a portion of the pasta with the tomato sauce into a bowl and add the roasted pepper bits and torn mozzarella on the top. Sprinkle some fragrant olive oil also on the pasta and serve.

This is a pasta dish full of good flavours, my favourites in fact.

Have you been growing veg or herbs this year, and what would your ideal harvest meal be?

Your VegHog

Harvest time

This summer and autumn have been so good weather wise here in southern England and my small balcony garden has been thriving. This week is the first rainy and somewhat chillier week. I'm happy to have more autumnal weather now anyway. Many things are still growing on my balcony, mainly tomatoes and peppers. Of course I already dedicated a whole post to my Tomato Tigerella, which are still giving a proud daily harvest. I'm very grateful for any new ones and hope that they'll keep it up for a while still. They have been incorporated into quite a few summer and autumn recipes now, and I haven't had to purchase any tomatoes for the past couple of months. 

The courgettes, yellow and green, also had a good run this year, but they've now slowed down in growth. And I pretty much decided that I won't be growing any courgettes next year, as they take awfully lot of room away on a small balcony. Now after two years of growing plants here, I've had wonderful courgette crops and maybe a gap year is in order for them. I didn't get sick of them yet, though. There are so many good dishes, where courgettes can be utilised.

At the moment the best growers are the peppers. I find such joy in following them grow and turn colour. I only harvested the first large one a few days ago, but there are plenty more of them coming. A second ripe one surprised me among the tomato wines. I had no idea any more that there were pepper plants in that pot, since the tomatoes properly took over. Many caterpillars plagued the pepper plants earlier in the summer, so the leaves got a bit eaten, but they survived and are doing fine. I let my friend remove the caterpillars in a humane way. Here are some photos of the development of the peppers and I'm sure that also recipes will follow.