Tell me which self-proclaimed-kitchen-goddess doesn’t dream of making fresh pasta. Well, moi aussi.
But this post is not about fresh pasta. This is about fresh lasagna, the easier one of the lot!
Couple of days ago, a friend invited a bunch of us, girlfriends over for lasagna in the evening. The evening was fun, full of laughter, conversation and great food. And I sat there and marveled as she counted her recipe of making fresh lasagna sheets. So simple, and I hadn’t tried it yet!
One of those days when I was eating salads on a daily basis, I felt this immense carb-craving. I craved pasta, and I knew exactly what I wanted to make.
I had bookmarked this awesome recipe from one of the earlier BBC Goodfood magazines, and knew I had to make this.
What has melted, almost-roasted cheese on top and makes your heart skip a beat and your mouth drool a bit? Yes, that's right, Sherlock! Its a Lasagna. :-D And vegan one, if you want it to be!
Are you one of those who doesn't try out a lasagna because of all the fatty ingredients in it? Do you think putting up a lasagna is a lengthy process and the result is often something that sits on your hips?
I love a good pasta, and its not secret to the readers of this blog, right? In spite of this undying love for pasta, I rarely order pasta when I eat out in Hyderabad, they try to pass off some soggy pasta in tomato sauce for Arrabbiata ... and I always feel I can do much better than those pastas.
The only pasta I relish is Masala Mafia in Little Italy. That one, I love, totally.
Now, not eating pasta anywhere out but loving it is a tough combination, which is why am always on a lookout for a good pasta sauce recipe, or spent a lot of time thinking them up. This one is from one such thought processes, and of course that awesome Red Chilli Pesto pasta I had in Chillies.
Creamy. Cheesy. Chunky .Crusty.
Roasted cheese and tomatoes. Spicy & Served warm.
And its a casserole.
Need I say more?
When I think of a pasta casserole, I think of something in red sauce. Not being a fan of white sauce myself, I don’t generally attempt to make anything with white sauce in it. But now, that’s gonna change.
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| Pair it with some red wine, and enjoy! |
And Pepper-Pesto base! Sounds awesome, no? :-)
The first ever time I tried roasted aubergine (eggplant or brinjal as it is known in India), I fell in love. With the burnt taste that lingers even after you peel off the burnt skin from the vegetable. Trust me, for all my culinary escapades (all 3 of them!:-P), I haven’t made Baingan ka Bharta before, and when the cook made an awesome job at it this week, it was like I rediscovered the taste of roasted brinjal all over again.
And when I spotted the fresh Fennel bulb in the grocery counter last week, I decided to marry these tastes. Fennel with roasted aubergine, that is. And it had to be with pasta.
I’ve already done the pasta with roasted aubergine in the base , so this time I wanted to try it as a filling in Lasagne. And to alternate it , I used some left over Pepper-Pesto base from the Pasta with pesto recipe.
Fennel with Roasted Aubergine combined with Peppers in pesto sauce , it was going to be. A total medley of flavours , no?
Ingredients (Serves 2)
Fennel Bulb – 1, washed and chopped to 1/2 cm pieces
Eggplant – 1 big, stove roasted and skin peeled off , chopped
Garlic cloves – 4-5 crushed
Olive oil – 1 tbsp
Dill – 1/2 tbsp
Sage – 1/2 tbsp
Pepper-pesto curry – Recipe from here – 2 cups
Lasagne sheets – 6 sheets, cooked and dried per instructions on the box
Cheddar cheese – 3-4 slices, enough to cover the lasagne in the last layer
Instructions
Prepare the garlic, aubergine and fennel pieces together by sautéing them in olive oil till the fennel is soft, and aubergine is mashed. Add some Dill and Sage to this while sautéing to give a herb-y flavour to the base. This should be a thick yet spread-able paste.
Grease an oven-proof bowl with a little olive oil, and pour one thin layer of the Aubergine-Fennel. Place the lasagne sheets , Pepper-Pesto base and the roasted aubergine-fennel base alternatively in the bowl. Top it with cheese.
Bake this in a pre-heated oven at 200C for 30 mins, or till the cheese becomes a golden brown on top.
Cut , garnish with pepper , sage or dill if required, and serve hot.
Its no news to readers of this blog that I love Pasta, right? And that I dream of Basil? Well… That and that I also love pesto. I’ve never tried it, but I guess I can eat basil pesto in almost everything, if you feed me. :) But then, fresh basil is little hard to find in Hyderabad. You need to be present when the vegetable load is being stored in the super market. You get there even 10 mins late, and Basil’s all gone. Guess am not the only one in love with this herb.
So during this week’s grocery shopping, I was delighted to find bunches of fresh basil , which I promptly picked. All of it. And made pesto with it all. Right now, I have enough pesto to make pasta for a full week. And the entire fridge is smelling like basil , inducing mouth-watering feelings in my head. :)
When I decided to finally drag my lazy self into the kitchen today, I decided it has to be dry pasta, with no sauce, and only pesto as the seasoning. I added the veggies and sautéed them in lot of olive oil, added garlic, and just a little oregano and red chilli flakes. And two big scoops of pesto. Needless to say, I am currently a very happy woman, with her stomach full of awesome pasta, and house smelling of fresh basil. :-D
Ingredients (Good enough to season Pasta for 5 people)
Basil Pesto - 4 Tbsps
Olive oil – 4-6 tbsps
Onions – Diced thin, 2 medium sized
Green , Red and Yellow Peppers – Sliced very thin – 1 each
Cherry Tomatoes – sliced into half – 10-15
Aubergine/Brinjal – Stove roasted, and mashed into a pulp – 1/2 cup (optional)
Red Chilli Flakes – 1 tbsp
Dried Oregano – 1 tbsp
Sea Salt – To taste
Garlic cloves – sliced very thin , 10-12
Pasta – Cooked per instructions on the box – 1 cup (for two people)
Parmesan cheese – 1 tbsp worth shavings
Instructions
Sauté the onions, peppers , garlic and cherry tomatoes till they all are cooked.
If using roasted aubergine, add it to this mixture.
Add the pesto this , and mix well to coat all the vegetables
Season with Oregano and chilli flakes and add salt to taste
This mixture can be cooled and saved in the fridge for later use also.
Mix 1.5 cups of this sautéed mixed vegetables with cooked pasta, and serve hot.
Garnish with Parmesan cheese, if using.
I know its no news to whoever reads this blog that I love pasta. And pasta is dancing in my mind’s eye all the time. In its spaghetti form, in its fusilli form and as Lasagne. (Yeah, Penne is not a personal favourite). What makes or breaks the pasta is its sauce. The freshness of the ingredients, the right balance of the herbs in the sauce and the method of making the sauce, that determines the taste of the pasta.
While searching through my blog for some red-sauce based pasta, I found this recipe in which I blend all the ingredients after they are cooked. That looked like the best way to make my own sauce back then, but on giving more thought, I came up with this one. Puree the tomatoes separately. And then adding them to the onion-garlic mixture with herbs. Trust me, this one tastes so much better, and you can feel all the veggies.
Also serving the pasta with mozzarella chunks was something I read on a site, and thought was a cool idea. If you love Mozzarella but think that its stringy texture will interfere with the texture of the pasta, sprinkle the chunks after your pasta is done.
I added aubergines to this to have another flavour in the sauce, but you can totally omit them and make yourself a Arrabiata pasta. Typically, you’ll need two ladles of this sauce to make one serving of pasta, for one person.
Ingredients
(Serves 4-6 people for main course)
Ripe red tomatoes – 1 kg
Aubergines, diced into thin slices – 1/2 kg
Onions, large – Diced – 2-3
Garlic cloves – crushed – 15
Dried basil – 2-3 tbsp
Dried oregano – 2-3 tbsp
Red chilli flakes – 2-3 tbsp
Sea salt – to taste
Olive Oil – 3tbsp
Instructions
Pierce a fork into the tomato, and put it on a high flame directly. The skin of the tomato starts burning, and it gets roasted. Do this for the entire batch of tomatoes, and let them cool.
Once they cool down, peel the skin off and crush them in a mixer/blender.
Heat this liquid till the water evaporates, and you are left with thick tomato puree.
In a pan, heat the oil, and sauté the onions and garlic. Once they turn baby-pinkish, add the aubergines to this, and sauté till all are cooked. Add the herbs for flavour, and salt to taste.
Now add the tomato puree and boil. Check the salt to taste.
This sauce can be saved or frozen in the refrigerator to be used later.
To make pasta, cook the pasta per the instructions , and toss it with the sauce. Serve hot with Mozzarella cheese chunks.
The freshness of the tomato will hit you, and before you can recover , the cheese will melt in your mouth. And then its the savouring of the other herbs and spices in it… Trust me, this recipe will never go wrong.
Apparently this is the Cook-For-Self-And-Eat-Alone-Week at home, starring yours truly.
So instead of sitting and moping around the whole weekend all by myself like a lazy bug on the couch, I’ve lined up a zillion activities to do, most important of them being a spa appointment and planning to make an entire Lasagne for myself :) And when one has such important activities to do in a jam-packed weekend, one has to plan in advance. And that planning started tonight.
All through the drive back home from office, I kept on thinking on what I’d like to have for dinner (oh yes, food is on my mind ALL.THE.TIME! Either am thinking about what to cook, or how a particular dish tasted or generally craving for food. Basically, I think I only think about food! :))
Something that I really love to eat which the husband doesn’t greatly love. Something savoury , coz after having polished off an entire loaf of Banana bread this week I was in no mood for any more dessert. And Providence gave me the answer – Pasta, of course! :-D
But tonight, I wanted to make something I haven’t made before, something new. I scrounged through the Must Try page of my Recipe notebook in OneNote (a very clever product placement, right? :)), and found some pasta recipes that I had wanted to try. And when you have great plans like this, and zero patience to stop at the farmer’s market en route home and your fridge tells you in not so many words to STFU about making anything fancy and stick to something basic because it can provide only for that, and you gotta listen to it, which is what I did, obediently.
What I could salvage from the fridge could provide for a tomato based pasta. So I decided to go ahead with it, but with a slight twist. Something creamy, and yet tomato-ey. And with lots of herbs. And something that will be done in 10 mins flat.
The recipe is a very basic creamy tomato sauce recipe, and I did nothing new except of course alter the amount of ingredients to suit my taste. Which means, more garlic and oregano and aaaah basil!
Ingredients
Fusilli – 1 cup
Tomato paste – 1 cup (I just put the tomatoes in a mixer to get the paste)
Thick cream – 1/4 cup
Olive oil – 1 tbsp.
Mozzarella cheese – For garnish
Garlic cloves – 4-6, chopped very small or crushed in a mortar-pestle
Oregano, Red chilli flakes, Basil, Black pepper, Sea salt – All per taste
Instructions
Boil a pot of water, and add salt to this once the water starts boiling. Now add the fusilli to this and let this boil for 8-10 minutes.
Meanwhile, in a pan, heat the oil and sauté the garlic. Add some oregano, chilli flakes, pepper and basil to garlic and let this mixture become roasted in the oil.
Now add the tomato paste to the oil, and let it boil. Once the paste starts boiling, add the cream and boil more till the paste thickens. You can add the herbs and spices again now if you wish, for some enhanced taste.
Season this sauce with some salt and add the boiled pasta to this sauce. Toss this well till the pasta is coated with the sauce.
You can garnish this pasta with any of the following - fresh basil leaves, parsley, cheese, pepper.
Serve hot.
And when I was making this pasta, I also made a big bowl of red sauce, hoping it will ease my first time lasagne efforts. Lots of onions and garlic, the tomato paste and all the herbs I could lay my hands on yielded me this sauce, and I cannot wait till I try it out.
The entire house is now smelling of fresh tomatoes and basil, I just licked off the remaining sauce from the plate, Kolaveri is playing in the background on the laptop as I am typing this, and I have enough books that will take another 20 years for me to read.
Life is good! :-)
Its been a while since we had pasta, and today being a holiday, me having a pack of Lomein Chinese pasta that a friend got from Hong Kong, and craving for something peanut-y, all inspired this pasta. Some search on the internet for an inspiration, and viola, this recipe was born!
Recipe Courtesy – Broadly inspired from the Lomein recipes off the internet
Ingredients
For the sauce -
Roasted peanuts - 2 fistfuls
Sesame seeds - 2 tbsps
Soya sauce - 2 tbsps
Vegetable broth - 1 cup
Red chilli flakes - 2 tbsps
Sesame oil - 2 tbsps
Salt - To taste
Preparing the vegetables & pasta -
Onions - Length wise sliced - 1 cup
Spring onions - 1 bunch - inch-wise pieces
Green Capsicums - 1 - Chopped in one inch pieces
Carrots - sliced into thin pieces - 1/2 cup
Red chilli flakes - 1 tbsp
Garlic - 8 cloves - crushed in a mortar pestle
Lemon juice - 2 tbsp
Roasted peanuts - 2 tbsps
Sesame oil - 2 tbsps
Lomein pasta - 2 fistfuls, cooked per the instructions on the cover
For Garnish -
Cilantro/Coriander leaves - chopped
Roasted sesame seeds
Instructions
The sauce -
Grind the peanuts and the sesame seeds in a mixer-grinder. Heat the broth in a pan and add the soya sauce. Once the water+soya sauce mixture reaches the boiling temparature, add the peanut mixture, red chilli flakes. Add the sesame oil to this and whisk this mixture. Heat this till the sauce thickens. Remove this from the stove and let it cool.
The vegetables -
In a deep thick-bottomed pan, heat the oil and add the onions, garlic, chilli flakes, capsicum and carrots in that order, and heat them till they are all cooked. Crush the rest of the peanuts and add this to the vegetable mixture. Add salt to this mixture. Add the sauce to this vegetable mixture and mix well so that all the vegetables are coated with the sauce. Now add the cooked pasta and toss well. Remove from heat and add the lemon juice.
Garnish with cilantro leaves and serve hot. Super hot! :)
Readers to this blog, by now would have known my love for anything which would be remotely related to pasta, right? :)
So one evening, I was wondering what to eat, and as usual my mind suggested I make pasta. But having had pasta for the major part of the week, I knew the husband would crib if I fed him the same thing again. Some googling and some imagination led me to this recipe, and I immediately tried it.
And as usual, the husband told me that it was the best pasta I ever baked! :) (He does that for every new pasta recipe I make, always the same words! :))
Ingredients:
1 5’x5’ baking pan. I used a Borosil glass one
4 tomatoes, cut into quarter pieces
4 tbsp Olive oil
1 tbsp each of Oregano, Sage and Basil dried herbs
1 tbsp chilli flakes
Sea salt – To taste
1 cup boiled and made pasta. I used whole-wheat penne and fusilli.
Britannia Masala Mania cheese cube – 1, cut into pieces
2 tbsp shredded mozzarella cheese
Crumbs out of 1 wheat bread slice
Method:
1. Preheat the oven to 200C
2. Place the quarter-cut tomatoes in the baking pan, sprinkle the herbs , chilli flakes and sea salt on the tomatoes. Drizzle this with the olive oil and bake for about 15-20 mins, or till the tomatoes are cooked, and are mashable
3. Once baked/cooked, mash the tomatoes into a sauce-like paste, with a spoon.
4. Mix the crumbs and the shredded mozzarella into this paste. This would thicken the sauce, if its too watery.
5. Add the cooked pasta into this paste, mix well.
6. Top this with the Britannia cheese pieces. Alternatively you can use cheddar also, but I love the flavours in this cheese, though its processed.
7. Bake for 10 mins, or till the cheese pieces turn into a golden brown. They are a serious treat! :)
8. Enjoy this pasta as it is or with a slice of warm bread.
The above pic is from the second time, when I used some zucchinis(I cooked them in olive oil and some herbs separately, and added after I mashed the tomatoes) and whole-wheat penne. I loved this version also equally. I even stored it to eat it as breakfast the next day, and it tasted better the next day.
As already wrote here, pasta is my ever favourite food to eat. Its something I cook when I am bored or when I am feeling excited or when I have time to cook or when I am too busy – just about anytime.
I used to buy the canned red sauce by Barilla and make the pasta before, but after bumping into a ton of recipes on the net for it, I decided to make my own. Now, there is nothing new in my recipe, but I just tweak around the ingredients, the quantity of the herbs to suit our palate and cut through some long routes :) . The result is always a good pasta, but something I can never replicate, because of the runtime alterations I do to the recipes.
I am sure I am not going to follow the same recipe the next time I make pasta, but this is the basic framework with which I am going to work around :). The changes I do are generally with the herbs, the
This recipe has more vegetables than is generally found in a regular pasta, and serves two for dinner.
Ingredients & Procedure:
For the sauce:
2 medium sized onions, chopped
4 large tomatoes, chopped
2 green chillies, diced
6 cloves garlic, crushed
2 tbsps olive oil
Salt to taste
1 tsp each of Oregano and basil
In a pan, heat the oil on medium flame and put in the chillies and crushed garlic. After 2 mins, put the onions in the oil and roast till the onions turn to a pale pink color. Add the herbs to this. Now add the tomatoes to this and let these cook in the oil. After about 5 mins, when the tomatoes are cooked, add the salt, take the pan off the stove and let this mixture cool. Pour in a mixer and blend to a thick red paste.
For the pasta:
2 cups whole-wheat pasta(fusilli, penne or spaghetti), cooked al-dente
1/2 cup each chopped vegetables (green, red and yellow capsicums, zucchinis, cauliflower florets)
1 medium-sized onion, chopped into long pieces
1 cup washed and chopped spinach leaves
2 tbsps olive oil
1 tbsp each Italian herbs (I generally use oregano, thyme, basil, sage)
1 tbsp basil pesto
Salt to taste
2 cups red sauce(made from the recipe given above)
For garnishing:
Cheese grated or diced. (I generally use the Britannia Masala Mania cheese cubes or Cheddar slices)
Heat the oil in a thick bottomed pan and add the onions to this. Add the herbs and basil pesto and let these roast in the oil. Put the capsicums in the pan now, and roast them for 4-5 mins. Now add the other vegetables like cauliflower florets, spinach and zucchinis and cook for another 4-5 mins. Now add the red sauce to this mixture, and let it cook till the sauce boils. Add the salt to taste in this mixture. Add the cooked pasta to this and mix this well, but careful to not crush the veggies.
Garnish with the cheese and serve warm.
After all the eating we did yday, I had no patience to enter the kitchen anymore. The cook had come early in the morning and made methi parathas for lunch for both of us, and also some breakfast. All we did the whole day was to laze around, read books and watch a bit of TV and of course, fight over who gets to sit in the bay window. Only in the evening did I realize that I had not planned anything for dinner and that S, the husband guy, would soon start complaining of how loud his stomach is rumbling. I had to quickly think of what to do, and thats when it struck to me that I had a big bowl of veggies lying in the freezer, the ones that I could not bake into the au gratin. And the next thing I thought of was Pasta! Yaay! :)
Yes, pasta is my favourite dish to eat or to cook. My love affair with pasta started when we started dining at Little Italy, and I would always order for a pasta and S would ask for his favourite Siciliano Pizza. Then I gave the whole dish a thought and figured out I could probably cook it at home too. Thats how my journey with pasta started. I used to make pasta using the Barilla readymade pasta sauces. Then the health-food trip in life started and I could smell the artificial ingredients through the sauce. The pasta would be all wheat based or organic and the sauce would be artificial. Uuuugghhhh!
Some more serious thought and I decided to just make my own sauces. White sauce was always out of the question, coz we both never really liked it, the color and its texture. Red sauce it had to be then.
I am still not sure how different or same my pasta recipe is from the others, but for a long time, I would only cook one type of pasta, almost every weekend. Pasta with whole lot of veggies sauted in olive oil, boiled in mashed tomatoes and some Italian herbs for garnishing. It tastes great, is very healthy and that was what mattered to me.
Father-in-law and the husband vouched for its taste but guess somewhere down the line, I got tired of making the same pasta and my palate started asking for more. That was when i discovered this very awesome tasting and healthy pasta recipe on SaffronTrail. So that was it for some more days, till one day when S told me that now he is tired of the same recipe.
So with the box full of sauted veggies in my freezer and a bottle full of homemade basil pesto sauce in my fridge, I decided to cook something which would replicate the taste of basil pesto pasta I ate at Sweet Nirvana the other day. That was how my other pasta recipe was born.
I just sauted the veggies more, put in two dollops of basil pesto sauce in it, and sauted it for 2 mins. Added the cooked fusilli to the mixture, and voila, our dinner was ready.
It didnt exactly taste like the one I ate in Sweet Nirvana, but S loved it so much that he called this my best ever pasta. Now, thats enough for me! :)
