My friend P. and I made this pasta salad when I had to work in the Hague. We felt like making a pesto pasta salad. We got the good stuff, often ready made pesto’s contain ingredients that absolutely don’t belong in there like potato, cashew nuts and sometimes even spinach.

Cook the pasta and in the meantime cut up your vegetables. I cut the aubergine and courgette in in long slices and then into bite size pieces. In a pan with a little bit of oil I grilled the aubergine slices until nicely browned. The courgette was grilled until it still had a bit of bite. Cut the grilled peppers into bite size pieces. For extra ease we bought the grilled peppers in a jar.

Drain pasta and rinse with a bit of cold water. Mix with pesto, grilled vegetables, tomatoes, feta, smoked chicken and pine nuts and you’re done. Super easy and yummy taste . Make sure you make lots so you have some left for lunch the next day. If you don’t like smoked chicken, you could always leave it out or use regular panfried chicken.

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Boil your pasta as you prefer. Slice the mushrooms and pan-fry until nicely cooked with brown edges. Add the small chopped onion and cook until golden.

In the meantime put on a sauce pan and put in the cup of creme fraiche and grated parmesan to taste. I’m not much of a cheese fan, but it’s grate with the parmesan. If you don’t have it, add some other aged grated cheese. Put on a low heat so the creme fraiche and parmesan melt into each other.

Add strips of cured ham to the mushrooms and onion and bake until slightly browned, add chopped parsley.

Now to finish the sauce, pour the creme fraiche/parmesan sauce into the mushroomy mix, season, warm through and add your cooked pasta.

I wouldn’t recommend using spaghetti pasta, tagliatelle or pappardelle would work better.

Another super easy and delicious dish made by the BF. Mostly heart warming cold weather food. <3

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Most of the time I make “lazy spaghetti” and just buy a jar of sauce, mix in ground meat and throw it on the pasta. Et voila dinner is ready. But I wanted to try something different. So here goes, the amounts feed about an army.

For the meatballs take 500gr of mixed ground beef/pork, add milk, chili sauce, oregano to taste, salt and pepper to taste and add enough breadcrumbs to get a firm mixture. Form your meatballs golfball size and brown them, no oil necessary. You don’t need cook them through as they will cook in the sauce (they keep their moisture this way). Remove from the pan.

For the sauce, chop onion and cook until golden. Then add the rest of the ground meat and losen it with a spoon so your sauce will get more body. After the meat has been browned add oregano/salt/pepper to taste and add the two cans of tomatoes.
To cut the sourness of the tomatoes add some sugar, I used about 2 to 3 tablespoons. Add the balls back into the pan into the sauce. Let this simmer for about half an hour, stirring every once in a while. Mix the sauce through your cooked pasta and you have a super easy, yummy spaghetti and meatballs.

For the pasta I used De Cecco Spaghetti 12. Which is a fairly thick spaghetti. This recipe isn’t exactly rocket science. Not sure if it’s even worth posting. Just trying to show you how easy it is to make your own sauce. I’ve made this dish before using yoghurt instead of milk for the meatballs and the balls turned out even more succulent and yummy. I’ll keep on using yoghurt next time.

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