Meatless Mondays: creamy pumpkin pasta

 I've been lurking around on Veggie Mama's blog every Monday enjoying the cache of vegetarian recipes. We are far from being vegetarian at our house, but I do love vegetables of all varieties, and we have a number of vegetarian friends and relatives, so a good veggie-friendly recipe is always handy.

I'm not going to commit to eating vegetarian every Monday as we probably manage meat free meals about twice a week anyway, but I will try to post a meat free recipe each Monday even if it was consumed some other day. Here is my first attempt - creamy pumpkin pasta. It's not particularly decorative, but it creates an instant party in your mouth. Promise.

Creamy pumpkin pasta

The amounts here are very approximate as I didn't measure. I googled a few different versions of similar recipes, and then just used what we had.

500gm butternut pumpkin

1 tbspn olive oil

1/2 cup of cream

2/3 cup of full fat milk

A clove of garlic

The leaves from three or four sprigs of thyme

Grated parmesan cheese

A handful of chopped parsley

1. Cut the pumpkin into chunks, toss them in the olive oil and put them on an oven tray. Mine were probably about 2.5x1.5cm but it doesn't really matter how big they are, except that bigger bits will take longer to cook. Bake them in the oven at 200C for about 20 minutes, or longer if necessary, until very soft and a bit brown.

 3. Whizz the pumpkin into mush using a hand blender or food processor.

4. Put the cream, milk, garlic and thyme in a saucepan on low heat. You want it to boil but not crust over or curdle, so stir it frequently. Let it boil for maybe one minute then turn the heat right down.

5. Add the mushed pumpkin to the saucepan and stir it all together. Then blend it again so it makes a smooth sauce.

6. That's it. Serve it on pasta, with some grated parmesan and parsley. If I were writing a real chef-ly recipe I would have told you at some appropriate point to boil the water and cook the pasta, but you can figure that out, can't you?

 7. Eat it for dinner. Yum! If you are game you can try serving it to your toddler, but mine sent it straight back and demanded cheesy pasta for about the tenth time this week. I wasn't entirely unhappy with that as it meant there were leftovers. Yum!

Christmas Eve dinner for a tired, happy toddler

It's 5pm on Christmas Eve. So far today Little E has eaten two fried eggs, bacon ("ham! ham!"), two pancakes with raspberry sauce, gingerbread ("biccies"), chips (also biccies), rice crackers (little biccies), miniature chocolate Christmas brownies ("cakey") and mountains of watermelon.

It's dinner time. She's tired. I need something fail safe. So here it is. Cook in the microwave cheese sauce to put on pasta, and a plate with some cucumber and tomato.

Microwave cheese sauce for pasta or potatoes or whatever else

1 heaped tablespoon of butter

1 heaped tablespoon of plain flour

1 cup of milk

1 cup of grated cheese

Chopped parsley or chives

 

1. Put the butter in a microwave proof jug or deep bowl and zap for long enough that it melts (30 seconds in our microwave).

2. Add the flour and whisk vigorously until it makes a thick, lump-free paste.

3. Add the milk a little at a time and whisk vigorously until the liquid is lump-free, scraping down the sides with a spatula if necessary.

4. Zap in the microwave for two minutes then take out and stir.

5. Zap another two minutes then take out and stir again (you may need to do this again depending on your microwave - it should be quite thick by this point).

6. Stir in the cheese, zap for a further 60 seconds.

7. Stir in the herbs.

8. Serve on pasta. Freeze the excess in small portions in sandwich bags or ice cube trays.

I've used it as the base for baked macaroni cheese and I reckon it would be good on baked/boiled potatoes. I've also seen recipes that involve baking leftover cooked rice with cheese sauce and cooked vegetables.

I would post a photo of the result but again it was served in the red Ikea googly-eye bowl and no one but a toddler would think it appealing. That said, our toddler just devoured her bowl of without complaint and demanded seconds - a happy household all round. We're set to repeat today's excesses tomorrow.

Merry Christmas wherever you are.

Toddler creamy salmon pasta

Little E pleases me very much by being willing to eat fish. If we have fish and chips she won't touch the chips but will get through quite a bit of fish, either grilled or fried with the batter removed. 

I bought salmon for dinner for D and I, and had planned on giving E what is a staple for her: small pasta shells, a few cubes of cheese sauce from the freezer, frozen peas. Then I decided that it would go well with salmon, and chopped the skinny end off the piece (which would have been annoying anyway as it would have cooked much faster than the rest of the piece) fried it in a little bit of butter, flaked it and, voila! Creamy salmon pasta. Put together in less time than it took for Little E to watch her daily ration of Playschool. I contemplated taking a picture, then decided that the creamy mess in the red plastic Ikea bowl with the googly eyes didn't quite justify it. But E gobbled two bowls of it, then a bowl of strawberry yoghurt for dessert, and I felt like a virtuous Mumma.