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

Nutty vegetable pie topped with coquina squash mash

Oh, poor old me has been suffering from a bad cold since Sunday evening. Now I forced myself to the computer with a hot blackcurrant juice, as being active does make you feel slightly better. No doubt that I will soon be returning to bed to rest. However I wanted to post this recipe for a pie that I made a while ago. At the moment I don't have much strength for cooking. My favourite meal, when I'm sick, is spaghetti with little butter, salt and grated cheese. That's the glamorous food I'm planning to eat today as well. It's just suitably tasteless, but keeps you going.

So, quite the contrary this recipe is full of flavour. It's for a lentil, black bean and hazelnut pie with roasted coquina squash top. It really oozes autumn and warms you up on a chillier day.

Please have a look how easy it is to make.

1 coquina squash

Olive oil for roasting

½ tsp salt

1 cup breadcrumbs

Peel the coquina squash, remove the seeds and cut to wedges. Brush the wedges with olive oil and roast at 180-200C until soft with roasting marks. Mash the squash and season it with salt. I added breadcrumbs, as the squash mash can be fairly liquid, more so than a potato mash would be. So the breadcrumbs help to make it a sturdy top layer for this pie.

150 g hazelnuts

Cut the hazelnuts in half or into smaller crumbs and toast them in the oven.

1 cup green lentils

1 mushroom stock cube

Rinse the lentils and boil them in water with the mushroom stock cube until fully cooked.

240 g / 1 can black beans

3 shallots

3 garlic cloves

Olive oil for frying

1 cup dry cider

2 bay leaves

2 tbsp vegetable stock powder or two vegetable stock cubes

1 tbsp miso

Salt and pepper to taste

Chop the shallots and garlic finely and start cooking them in olive oil. Once the shallots and garlic are cooked soft, add the beans, cooked and drained lentils and toasted hazelnuts into the pan.

Cook for a couple of minutes and then add the cider and season with bay leaves, vegetable stock powder, miso, salt and pepper. Also add the miso to taste.

Let the mix simmer slowly for about 15 minutes. Then remove the bay leaves and layer the lentil mix into ramekins or a large oven dish.

Spread the squash mash on the top and bake the pie at 180C for about 40 minutes.

Enjoy your autumn pie!

Your VegHog

Very green salad

I have been looking into French vegetarian cuisine, because this year lucky me is spending Easter in Paris! Vegetarian meals are not so typical in traditional French cooking, but I'm determined to find the best influences and ideas. I have never been to Paris, and now I want to visit several vegetable markets, and hopefully will be able to find nice vegetarian cafés and restaurants. Any recommendations? I'm definitely going to post some exciting bits from my trip here afterwards, but now to today's recipe.

I recently purchased the wonderful vegetarian French Market Cookbook by Clotilde Dusoulier, where I found this recipe for the Very green salad – Salade toute verte (p.18-19). I was impressed by the freshness of the recipes in this book, and particularly in this one the flavours were nicely balanced. Have also a look at Clotilde's blog here, it's not a vegetarian blog, but many dishes are plant based. 

Here is my take on this filling warm and cold spring salad.

For the salad:

500g new potatoes + a sprinkle of salt and vegetable oil for roasting the potatoes

200g asparagus

1 cup of frozen peas

1 large heart of romaine lettuce

½ cup hazelnuts

For the dressing:

Some fresh coriander leaves

1tbsp lemon juice

1tbsp grapeseed oil

1tbsp hazelnut oil

1tsp sea salt

½tsp ground black pepper

Method:

Wash the potatoes, place them in a roasting dish, brush with vegetable oil and sprinkle with sea salt. Roast them at 180C for about 40 minutes until cooked. Toss them a few times during the roasting.

Toast the halved hazelnuts. Put then in an oven dish and bake at 180C for about 10 minutes. Steam the asparagus and peas until tender.

Cut the lettuce and prepare the dressing by just mixing the ingredients together. Add the dressing to the lettuce just before the warm components are done. I decided to serve the peas and asparagus also warm, just like the potatoes.

Then mix all the ingredients together and serve instantly. Bon appétit!

Your VegHog

Asparagus pasta

It's delightful to see that the first local asparagus spears start appearing in the shops here in England, and you probably won't be surprised to hear that I instantly had to buy a few bunches once I saw them. Hence today's recipe is just a quick weekday pasta using green asparagus as an ingredient, because a simple weekday pasta is such a fine thing to have after a busy day. I also have a new source for vegetarian hard cheese, Bookham & Harrison's online shop, and today I used their wonderful Sussex Charmer cheese in this dish. This also means that I will be cooking and posting more pasta dishes again, so here is today's recipe, try it!

125g green asparagus

1 shallot

2 garlic cloves

20g hazelnuts

20g Sussex Charmer/or any vegetarian hard cheese

½ lemon's juice

1tbsp olive oil

½tsp salt

½tsp black pepper

300g semi-wholewheat tortiglioni

A few mint leaves for serving

Chop the hazelnuts, shallot and garlic finely, and cut the asparagus into about 2 cm long pieces. Cook the shallot and garlic in olive oil in a pan until soft, steam the asparagus for about 5 minutes, and toast the hazelnuts in an oven dish for about 10 minutes at 175C. Combine the shallots, garlic, asparagus and hazelnuts and add lemon juice, salt and pepper to the pan.

In the meanwhile cook the pasta al dente. Take a few tablespoons of the pasta boiling water and add it to the sauce, also add a little bit of the cheese to the pan. Make thin shavings of the rest of the cheese.

Once everything is cooked and seasoned nicely, combine the pasta with the sauce and serve with fresh mint leaves and hard cheese shavings on the top.

Stay hungry!

Your VegHog