Pastitsio. Need I Say More?

Tags

bechamel, bolognese, cheese, crockpot, Greek, meat sauce, minced meat, pasta bake, pastitsio, slow cooker, spaghetti

Hello! Well, yes, here I am! It’s been a while. Phew, a busy few weeks. I’ve just completed the last of a series of projects that popped up at the same time as my new Greek blog launch. One was a recipe contest for the restaurant chain TGI Friday’s, the other a guest post at a food related website (more on that in future) and the final one was another secret mission about which I can say that it involved making a Christmas recipe and photographing it. While it was 25C outside. Weirdest feeling!

All this at the time I was supposed to be building up the content of my own new blog. And practicing my new food styling and photography skills after a fabulous workshop in Holland at the end of September. Oh, and entertaining my gorgeous little nephews who came over for a week’s visit from the UK with my cousin and my uncle! Rather than try and do everything at once (I’m not good at that) I set myself a schedule (I’m better at that) and got all the projects done one after the other, while keeping a week in between completely free so I could enjoy the holiday with my family. It was my uncle’s first visit to Greece, after his sister (my mum) has lived here for 45 years! It was such a fab week!

Gazing at the sea on a one-day cruise
Swimming in a pool all to oneself
Being buried in the sand
Eating a huge ice-cream
Digging one’s way to China

Now I’m hoping to get into a rhythm with my posts, both for The Foodie Corner and OTO Spaghetti, and maybe show up here a little more often. That’s the plan anyway…

In order to celebrate all the above, and to make up for my disappearance, I am sharing a really good recipe. Not that all the rest aren’t really good… but this is a rather special dish. Pastitsio. Anyone who has been to Greece knows what it is. Its elements are I suppose –more or less- the same as those of lasagne, but somehow the taste is different. Equally yummy, but different. While lasagne is best made to be fairly sloppy, pastitsio should be able to proudly stand tall with each layer clearly visible on its mouthwateringly beautiful profile. Yes, I do love my pastitsio, is it that obvious?

Now, I know with lasagne lots of people go and add a cartful of veggies and make all sorts of adjustments. That would be fine here as well, but your end result would not be pastitsio. I’m sure it would be tasty, but I would have to object to the name being used in vain. The meat sauce has to be fairly simple, in fact even my recipe is quite a fancy version, and it has to be thick, not runny. It might be hard to find the proper pasta to use, it’s called bucatini (a thick spaghetti with a hole running through it), but it’s worth the search. If you really really really have to, use penne or rigatoni. I don’t think spaghetti is a good substitute. The béchamel, unlike lasagne, has egg in it which keeps it nice and thick (remember the standing tall thing).

Pastitsio is one of those with which you end up dirtying a hundred different pots and pans. That might have something to do with why I don’t make it that often… But it’s soo worth it. Here’s the recipe. It’s based on the one in the little Greek book “Recipes for children” by Mima Karvouni, a little gem of a book I use to find things to make for The Mister when I run out of ideas for food he might actually like rather than put up with (i.e. my usual blog experiment type cooking). For the meat sauce I use my slow cooker Bolognese recipe which is super tasty. Making it in the slow cooker is brilliant in this case, as you will see from all the steps below. You can make it the conventional way, there is a note in the same post for a stovetop method.

So, here goes… (ingredients are listed by order of appearance)

Pastitsio

Ingredients

500g bucatini pasta
2 Tbs margarine or butter or 1 Tbs oil (to keep the pasta from sticking)
1/2 c grated cheese (a hard yellow cheese would be best, like gruyere or parmesan or maybe manchego)
1 egg
salt & pepper
1 litre (approx. 4 cups) thick Bolognese sauce. Use this recipe BUT omit the stock to ensure a thicker consistency. It should be slightly thicker than what you would want from a sauce over a plate of pasta.

For the béchamel
100g margarine or butter
100g all purpose flour
1 litre milk
pinch of nutmeg
salt & white pepper (or black if not available)
1 egg

3/4 c grated cheese for topping
1/4 c breadcrumbs (not traditional, can be omitted)

Instructions

1. Boil pasta according to packet instructions, being careful not to overcook. Drain and add the 2 tablespoons of marge. Stir gently so that pasta is coated, then set aside to cool.
2. If you haven’t already made your meat sauce, do that now.
3. When the pasta has cooled a bit, add the egg and ½ cup of cheese, stirring gently till the pasta is coated with the mixture. Careful the egg doesn’t scramble.
4. Put half the pasta in a baking dish (mine is 30cm x 27cm – about 12”x10.5”), spread it around nicely and add the meat sauce in a layer on top. Then cover the meat sauce with the rest of the pasta, again spreading it out.
5. Make your béchamel. It’s important here that you have all the ingredients ready next to you. Melt the marge in a medium sized saucepan on medium to high heat, add the flour and mix well with a wooden spoon. You want the mixture to come together into a paste. Cook for a few minutes stirring constantly. Working quickly, switch the spoon for a whisk* (keep spoon next to you), lower heat to medium and add about half the milk while whisking quickly. Keep whisking till the mixture becomes smooth. It might thicken quickly, if it does then add the rest of the milk, without stopping the whisking. If it doesn’t, add the rest of the milk gradually (still whisking). When you are confident that the sauce is smooth, turn the heat up just a bit and switch back to your spoon. I find the spoon better at this stage as I can feel the bottom of the pan better and know if it’s catching. If it is, turn the heat back down to medium. Keep stirring, getting into the corners of the pan, till the sauce thickens a bit. It doesn’t need to be super thick as the egg will thicken it later. I stop when I can just see the bottom of the pan when the spoon swishes around during stirring.
6. Take the béchamel off the heat, add the nutmeg and some salt and pepper.
7. Preheat the oven to 200C (or 180C on fan).
8. When the béchamel has cooled just a bit, add the egg while stirring vigorously. Pour the sauce over the top layer of pasta in the dish.
9. Mix the ¾ cup cheese with the breadcrumbs and sprinkle over the top of the pastitsio.
10. Bake for about 45 to 50 minutes, until the top is nicely browned. Let the pastitsio rest before cutting and serving.

Note: (*) I find the best whisk for sauces and custards is the one pictured below. It gets into the corners of the pan better than the others, which are more suitable for bowls.

And a small announcement: In between writing steps 9 and 10 I found out that two of my recipes have made it to the final of the TGI Friday’s recipe competition. I’m a happy bunny!

Smoked Salmon, Raw Courgette (Zucchini) and Spearmint Cannelloni Bites

Tags

courgettes, feta, Greek yogurt, herbs, lemon, nuts, pasta, salad, smoked salmon, spearmint, zucchini

Last Saturday it was The Mister’s birthday, so I decided to throw him a surprise party. I had been thinking of doing this for a while now, but I just couldn’t believe I could pull it off. But I did! Boy was it hard work, and nerve wracking and complicated. But so worth it. He was truly gobsmacked!

As you can imagine, I went a bit overboard with the food. I started preparations on the Wednesday, with the first step being the menu, the shopping list and the schedule. Yes, like the one I mentioned in my post on preparing ahead. Thursday morning was supermarket time, and from then on I spent a significant amount of time in the kitchen, cooking up all sorts of goodies. I was expecting about 20 people, so a buffet style dinner was the best option. For a peek at the menu take a look at the bottom of the post. It might seem a strange assortment of dishes, but I wanted to include some of The Mister’s favourites as well as some slightly more adventurous recipes. One of which is the dish featured in this post, Smoked Salmon, Raw Courgette (Zucchini) and Spearmint Cannelloni Bites.

You are probably wondering what I did for a birthday cake. Well, you will be surprised or maybe even shocked to hear that I let go of that part and allowed The Mister to blow out candles on a store bought cake. Was it a terrible thing to do? Well, time-wise it would have been a struggle to make it myself (it might have even ruined the surprise as he decided to come home early on the day of the party – yeah, I have a couple more gray hairs thanks to that – and he would have more than likely found me icing it). Plus, Greek store bought birthday cakes are delicious (they are patisserie style, creamy affairs with whatever decoration you can imagine – in this case The Mister’s football team emblem). And sometimes, you just have to accept that you can’t do everything. So I’m glad and grateful to The Mister’s sister for taking care of it!

Moving on to our recipe. A couple of weeks ago I saw that this month’s “Swallow’s Recipes for Life” challenge on Bangers & Mash is a recipe using salmon, courgette (zucchini) and pasta. I knew I wanted to participate, as these are favourite ingredients of mine. I had recently made a gorgeous pasta salad with raw zucchini (recipe by Elena’s Cooking) and thought I could use that as a base. It’s so summery and fresh tasting. I did however, want to make it a bit different to your average pasta salad. The original idea was to make a filling and stuff large pasta shells with it; that didn’t work out though as this particular type of pasta seems to have vanished from supermarket shelves in Athens. The only other alternative I could think of was cannelloni tubes. I wanted something that could be eaten as finger food, so it had to be large enough to accommodate a bite size portion of filling. This was the result. It was impressive and pretty, but also a little faffy! So you will find two versions here, one for the bites as shown in the picture and one for a regular pasta salad.

Makes 30 – 40 bites

Ingredients

300g courgettes (zucchini) (approx. 3 medium sized)
salt for helping courgettes to release water
200g smoked salmon, cut into chunks
140g Greek yogurt
20g (about 2 tsp) mayonnaise
80g feta cheese, crumbled into small pieces
2 Tbs spearmint, finely chopped (measured after chopping)
3 Tbs olive oil (plus more for pasta)
1 lemon, zest of
1 Tbs lemon juice
1/4 tsp white pepper (or more to taste)
1 Tbs pine nuts (optional)
1 box (250g) cannelloni or 250g pasta (penne, fusilli or farfalle)

Instructions

1. Coarsely grate courgettes and place in a colander over a bowl. Sprinkle lightly with salt, shake/flip in the colander and sprinkle again. Set aside for at least 30 minutes so liquid is released.
2. If you are making the pasta salad, boil your pasta according to package instructions. Drain and return to the pan (off the heat) with a bit of olive oil so the shapes don’t stick together. Shake it all up once in a while. For the cannelloni bites boil the tubes till tender but be careful not to overcook. After about 10 minutes taste one to be sure. When ready drain them and return to the pan with olive oil.
3. Put salmon chunks in a big bowl.
4. In a smaller bowl mix yogurt, mayonnaise, feta, spearmint, olive oil, lemon zest and juice, pepper and pine nuts if using. Mix well with a fork, breaking up any feta lumps. Taste and adjust to your liking. Add to the salmon but don’t mix yet.
5. After about 15 minutes you will see that the courgettes have started to “sweat”. When the half hour is up, help them along by squeezing a bit with your hands being careful not to mush them. Add to the bowl with the salmon and yogurt mix.
6. For the pasta salad, add the pasta to the bowl and toss well but carefully. Let it cool completely and refrigerate till a couple of hours before serving.
7. If you are making the cannelloni bites, toss the courgette, salmon and yogurt mixture carefully. Place the bowl with the filling and the pan with the cannelloni near you. Bring out the serving dish and place that near you as well. Take a tube, cut it into three smaller tubes, and peel the first one open with your fingers. (Make sure they have cooled enough, but don’t let them get completely cold as they will stick.) Fill the little tube with a teaspoon or two of filling (place your fingers at the bottom to keep the filling in) and quickly stand it in the serving dish, open sides up and down. Be gentle and fairly quick so the filling doesn’t plop out of the bottom while being transferred. Keep going till your filling is finished. I garnished with tiny bits of dill weed, but they are just as pretty without. Refrigerate till a couple of hours before serving.

Notes:
– I used between 10 and 15 cannelloni tubes. Unfortunately it is necessary to boil more than you will use so that you can allow for some to split during boiling or filling. I kept the rest, filled with leftover meat sauce from the lasagna, put them on a layer of tomato passata in a baking tin and froze the whole thing. I am hoping that I can pop that in the oven with some béchamel on top and get a good result. I will let you know!
– If you can find the large pasta shells they might be easier and prettier to use.
– There are a lot of different tastes in this dish so you could definitely omit the pine nuts without compromising the result.
– For a more conventional flavour you could substitute the spearmint with dill weed. But the spearmint is so summery and fresh; I think it makes this dish special.

Our party buffet offered the following:
Lasagna (The Mister’s favourite. I promise I will share my recipe soon)
Gorgonzola Gnocchi Bake (will share recipe when I make it again)
Chickpea and Avocado Salad (based on this recipe by Kalyn’s Kitchen, but I used leafy greens and parsley instead of coriander. The chickpeas were cooked on Wednesday night using my slow cooker recipe)
Green Salad with Sundried Tomatoes and Walnuts (which my friend kindly made)
Tabbouleh (bulgur wheat salad made by my Mum)
Potato Puffs (recipe on The Kitchn)
Spanakopita Muffins (recipe coming soon)
Cheese and Rosemary Corn Muffins (recipe coming soon)
Corn and Capsicum Muffins (recipe by My Favourite Pastime)
Cheese Platter with Naxos Island Graviera, smoked Regato and mild Cheddar
Marinated Mini Mozzarellas (based on this recipe by The Kitchn)
German pork sausages, Greek pork sausages and beef sausages (thrown on the BBQ after the party got started – enjoyed as hot dogs by the kids)
Farmhouse Pickle to go with the corn muffins and cheese

Healthier Mac & Cheese with Cauliflower White Sauce

Tags

bechamel, cauliflower, cheese, cheese sauce, Mac & Cheese, pasta bake, vegetarian, white sauce

With many thanks to The Collector for the French antique plate, c. 1875-1891

I’ve started and re-started this post a couple of too many times now; it’s just not happening. Maybe I should leave it, and wait till some inspiration decides to return to my brain. I’m sure that would be the right thing to do. However, I really want to share this recipe with you all.

I made this dish a couple of weeks ago, after an impulse buy of a head of cauliflower at the supermarket. What’s that you say? The words cauliflower and impulse don’t belong in the same sentence? I know. It just looked so nice! And hey, it’s cheaper than a pair of Manolos. This version of Mac & Cheese is made with a thick white sauce, just like the classic, but with a twist. The white sauce is in fact a thick, gooey, creamy, cauliflower soup. Clever, isn’t it? The idea came from this Alfredo Pasta recipe on A Pinch of Yum. I tried it a while ago and really liked it, but thought I could take it up a notch in tastiness (and down a notch in healthiness) by adding a whole load of cheese to it. Baked Cauliflower Cheese was one of our favourite meals as kids, so combining that with pasta was a no-brainer really!

I’ve simplified the recipe for the sauce so the Mac & Cheese is fairly quick to throw together, but for a super fast meal, make the sauce the day (or a couple of days) before. Then you can just mix in some cheese and cooked pasta, sprinkle with breadcrumbs and pop it in the oven. In future I might even try replacing béchamel sauce in other recipes with this cauliflower sauce; for example it would probably be lovely in a veggie lasagna with spinach. But first I’ll have to convince The Mister to have a teeny weeny try. I know he’d like it but just the mention of the main ingredient sends him running to the souvlaki shop.

Healthier Mac & Cheese with Cauliflower White Sauce (Bechamel)

Serves 4

Ingredients

For the Cauliflower White Sauce (Bechamel)

1 small head of cauliflower (approx. 700-800g)
2 cups broth or stock, whatever type you prefer
White pepper, to taste
Nutmeg, to taste
Salt, to taste
1 Tbs cream
1 Tbs olive oil

For the Mac & Cheese

375g pasta (I used penne)
100g mature cheddar, grated
100g cheese of your choice, grated (choose one that melts well, mozzarella or gouda would be good – I used Greek Kaseri)
60g cheese for topping, grated (same as above, or Parmesan, or anything in the fridge that needs eating up! I used Kaseri again)
½ cup breadcrumbs for topping (or enough to cover your mac)
½ tsp Italian seasoning (or a mixture of any dried herbs you fancy)
White pepper, to taste
Salt, a good pinch
Cauliflower white sauce (I used most of the sauce made with the above ingredients – it depends how gooey/runny you like your Mac & Cheese)

Instructions

Cauliflower White Sauce

1. Cut the cauliflower into florets and boil it in the stock, covered, for about 30 minutes or until very tender.
2. Pour out 1 cup of the stock and set aside.
3. Using a stick blender, blend the cauliflower and remaining stock until smooth. Add the olive oil, cream, seasoning and the rest of the stock back in and continue to blend till very smooth (if you find that your sauce is already runny, just add as much of the reserved stock as necessary till it reaches the desired consistency. You want it thick and creamy, like béchamel. Mine was perfect with the 2 cups of stock).
4. Continue with the Mac & Cheese recipe or let it cool and refrigerate until needed.

Mac & Cheese with Cauliflower White Sauce

1. Preheat your oven to 180C.
2. Boil the pasta in plenty of salty water but stop just before it’s completely done (about 2 minutes less than you would normally cook it). Drain the pasta reserving ½ a cup of water.
3. Return the pasta to the saucepan and add the white sauce and cheeses (except the cheese for the topping). Stir well to combine. If it’s too thick you can thin it out with some pasta stock. I didn’t need to do this.
4. Now you can add some seasoning to the mixture if you want. I forgot to do this, so I just added the salt and pepper to the breadcrumbs. It worked for me because I liked the bursts of saltiness that came in the crunchy topping. If you prefer a mellower taste add the salt to the mixture.
5. Transfer mixture to an oven proof dish.
6. Mix the herbs (and seasoning if not already used) with the breadcrumbs and remaining cheese, and sprinkle over the mixture.
7. Bake for about 40 minutes or until the top is golden and the sides are bubbling a bit. If the sauce was in the fridge this might take a bit longer.
8. Let the Mac & Cheese rest for a while before cutting into it. Serve with a tomato or green salad.

Other Cool Cauliflower Recipes from around the Blogosphere
Cauliflower Cheese by The English Kitchen
Pureed Cauliflower by Kalyn’s Kitchen
Bacon Cheddar Cauliflower Chowder by Iowa Girl Eats
Cauliflower Crust Pizza with Fried Eggs by Love & Lemons
CrockPot Roasted Cauliflower Soup with Curry and Honey by A Year of Slow Cooking

Bolognese Sauce, In My Favourite Kitchen Gadget

Tags

bolognese, crockpot, ground beef, meat sauce, minced meat, slow cooker, spaghetti

And now for a slow cooker recipe!

The Christmas before last, my mum and I visited my brother and his wife who live in England. My brother is a talented cook, who mostly (unlike me) relies on his imagination to throw together yummy meals. At the time, he had recently discovered the magical world of slow cookers and raved about his new appliance. One evening during our stay we had a gorgeous beef stew which was miraculously waiting for us when we got home from a hard day’s money-spending. It was cool, and I had read about slow cookers a couple of years previously thinking “I should get one of those”, but actually I was not that bothered – I have no idea why. Luckily my mum knows me better than I know myself, and when she returned to Greece two days after me, she surprised me with a gorgeous little purple Crock Pot which she had lugged all the way back for me. Well, I can safely say this has now become my favourite kitchen gadget (um, after my iphone of course).

To be honest, this didn’t happen overnight. As I mentioned in my first post I like to follow recipes. So to start using my slow cooker I turned to –where else- the internet, to find some. I searched and searched, but wasn’t very happy with what I found. It seemed that most recipes were for a pot roast of some kind and always involved tins of cream of something soup, or dried soup, or jars of ready-made sauce. Don’t get me wrong, flipping back the ring of a can of Heinz Tomato Soup is one of my favourite ways to make dinner, but “recipes” featuring, for example, a can of cream of chicken AND a can of cheese soup (which I didn’t even know existed till then) did not sound very appealing. I was starting to feel quite disappointed when I stumbled on A Year of Slow Cooking. Now that was more like it! A blog with a healthy balance of mostly “from scratch” meals, but with a few quick and easy solutions for when you just can’t be bothered! Plus the added bonus of Stephanie’s great sense of humour. That’s when I got well and truly hooked on the slow cooker. A few months later I started using Twitter (an obsession I’ll talk about another time) which introduced me to a whole new world of food blogs, such as Kalyn’s Kitchen, The Perfect Pantry, Healthy Green Kitchen to name but a few. These all include some great slow cooker recipes, and Kalyn has now started a new site called Slow Cooker From Scratch, a great place to find exciting Crock Pot recipes – and not a tin of soup in sight…!

My Bolognese Sauce is based on a recipe by a well known Greek TV chef called Elias Mamalakis, who is also the publishing manager of the Greek version of the BBC’s Olive magazine. I have adapted the original stove top recipe for the slow cooker. What I usually do is make a batch and freeze half of it, either to use in a mini lasagne for two, or for a quick, easy meal after a long day at work. I hope you like it!

Slow Cooker Bolognese Sauce
Serves 4

You’ll need:
1 Tbs olive oil
500g minced (ground) beef
3 Tbs white wine vinegar
1 Tbs onion powder or 1 small onion, chopped finely
1 tin / 400g chopped tomatoes
1 cup / 250ml tomato passata (passata is a thick juice made from crushed and sieved tomatoes. Find more information here)
½ cup / 125ml vegetable stock
1 bay leaf
1 tsp sweet paprika
1 tsp cinnamon
½ tsp allspice
1 tsp salt
½ tsp black pepper
½ tsp sugar

What you do:

1. Heat the oil in a frying pan, over medium heat. If you are using regular onion instead of dried, add it to the pan and cook it gently until translucent, about 5 minutes. If not, heat the oil over medium high heat and start at step 2.
2. Turn the heat up to medium high, and add the minced meat. With a wooden spoon break up the minced meat as much as possible and keep stirring until there are no more pink bits.
3. Add the vinegar to the pan, and keep stirring the meat until the vinegar evaporates and the juices start to reduce. A couple of minutes should be fine.
4. Using a slotted spoon, transfer the meat to the slow cooker. Add one tablespoon of pan juices. How much juice you get after frying will depend on how fatty your meat was. If it was lean you probably won’t have much, so just tip the contents of the pan into the slow cooker without worrying about slotted spoons and all that.
5. Add the rest of the ingredients to the slow cooker. Give it all a stir.
6. Turn slow cooker to low and cook for at least 8 hours. Mine usually stays on for about 9-9 ½. I’ve never cooked this on high, so I don’t know how long you should leave it, I assume about 5 or 6 hours?
7. Serve over spaghetti with a generous amount of grated cheese sprinkled on top.

For those unlucky people who don’t have a slow cooker, try this:
Use 3 Tbs olive oil and only 1 cup of chopped tomatoes. Omit the stock.

• Follow steps 1 -3 above, but in a saucepan rather than a frying pan.
• Add chopped tomatoes and passata, bring to a boil.
• When it starts bubbling add the spices, salt, pepper and sugar (and onion if using dried).
• Stir and turn the heat down to medium low or low (depending on how hot your stove gets). You want a slow simmer. Cover the pan leaving a small gap and let the sauce simmer for about 45 minutes to an hour for best results.

Update on 30th Septmeber 2012:
Kalyn has kindly featured my recipe on Slow Cooker from Scratch! Yay! Check out the post for more fab slow cooker pasta sauce recipes, or the recipe index for loads more ideas.

On Top of Spaghetti

Tags

almond, baked, meatballs, recipe, spaghetti, tomato

Finally, I found a name for my blog. I’ve been thinking about starting this for months and months, but I hit a mental block when it came to choosing a name. I wanted something catchy, then I wanted something that would reflect my bilingual/bicultural background (Greek-English in case you’re wondering), then I wanted something catchy, then I wanted a food-pairing name like “sugar & spice” or “honey & thyme”… then I wanted something catchy. Then I gave up. I thought it would come to me. It didn’t. Today, I thought right, be proactive. So I turned to my buddy Mr. Google and just typed stuff in the magic box. Somehow this brought me to a nursery rhyme site and I got the bright idea to check food nursery rhymes. I was just about ready to name my blog Little Miss Muffet, when my eyes fell on the dreaded words… “On Top of Spaghetti”! The trembling started and I quickly grabbed the mouse to get away as fast as possible from the nightmare. Ok, I’m probably not making any sense right now; bear with me. When I was little, one of my aunties in England use to sing this to me. I hated it. It scared and depressed me, and made me cry. This, however, seemed to amuse certain members of my family! After all, it’s a song about meatballs, they were just teasing me (right?). Anyway for years since, whenever I’d hear the first few words I’d clasp my hands over my ears so hard I’d nearly squash my head flat. But today I thought this was a sign, an omen of some kind. Today I am meant to forgive the idiot who sneezed, and stop mourning over the loss of the poor defenseless meatball, whose life was so cruelly cut short. So I am facing my fear and in tribute, I am naming my blog after this tragic story.

And now, before you start recommending places with comfy couches (if you’ve even read this far), I’ll move swiftly on… This blog will be filled with recipes. Most of them will be other people’s, since I’m better at following instructions that creating things with my own imagination! The more I cook though, the more I’m getting a feel for doing my own thing, so occasionally there will be a triumphant creation or successful adaptation. There may be some flops too! I live in Greece but love all sorts of cuisines, so apart from say a spanakopita (spinach pie), I might also try a steak & ale pie. I hope you enjoy the recipes and tolerate the rambling.

My first recipe couldn’t be anything other than… “On Top of Spaghetti” (meatballs in tomato sauce). I found this on a great blog called Stonesoup, on a post with a collection of meals for a new mum (the author Jules’s sister). The idea was to make various meals ahead of Baby’s arrival, freeze, and enjoy at a time when cooking wouldn’t be an option. I found that to be one of the cleverest and most organized plans ever. There are quite a few evenings here when cooking is not an option so I made a big batch and froze half of it for a fuss-free after-work dinner another day. They froze fantastically. They are very easy to make and create a minimum of washing up. Win win!

Baked Meatballs in Tomato Sauce (very slightly adapted from this recipe on Stonesoup)
Serves 3-4
Cooking time about 1 hour

1 onion, finely chopped
1-2 Tbs olive oil
2 tins chopped tomatoes (you want about 800g)
1 tsp oregano or thyme or basil or mixture
1 tsp smoked paprika
½ tsp sugar
Salt & pepper
500g minced (ground) beef, or beef & pork mix
75g almond meal (I used no-skin almonds which I whizzed in the food processor as finely as possible)
2 tablespoons butter

1. Heat olive oil in a frying pan over medium/low heat, and when it’s warm add the chopped onion. Cook gently, until it softens and becomes translucent
2. Put half the cooked onion in a big bowl
3. Add the tomatoes to the pan with the rest of the onion and turn up the heat. When it starts boiling add herbs, paprika and sugar, and season with salt & pepper. Turn heat down and simmer for about 10-15 minutes
4. While sauce is simmering preheat the oven to 200C (400F)
5. Place meat and almond meal in the bowl with the onion, and use your hands to mix. Form little meatballs no larger than a golf ball and put them on a plate
6. Place tomato sauce in an oven proof dish or baking tin. Place meatballs on top and scatter pieces of butter over them
7. Bake for 30-45 minutes or until browned on top and cooked through

Enjoy over spaghetti (of course!) or rice. Or mashed potatoes. Or even quinoa. They go with pretty much everything!

Sheesh, writing this blog is going to make me hungry all the time…