Handmade pasta with roasted pumpkin

With excitement, on Boxing Day I tested out the new pasta maker I was given the day before. On the first attempt I used vegan dough which didn't work out so well (if anyone has a good recipe please let me know). On the second attempt I included a few eggs from my parents’ free-range chickens. It worked nicely.

The pasta was topped with a basic tomato and onion sauce with roasted pumpkin and pine-nuts. Perfect post-Christmas easy meal (apart from cleaning up the flour that I seemed to have spread all over the kitchen…).

Moroccan Pumpkin Couscous Salad

I'm not the world's biggest pumpkin fan, so when one happens to arrive on my doorstep as part of my Green Line delivery, I usually try and make something super-delicious. This week I was having a little browse through the Where's the Beef blog and found this recipe, which I adapted slightly. Yum!

Moroccan Spiced Pumpkin
1 small-ish pumpkin (about 1.5kg)
2 tbspn olive oil
1 tbspn soy sauce / tamari
1 tbspn pomegranate molasses*
1 tbspn coriander seeds
1 tspn cumin seeds
2 tspn ras el hanout
1 orange (or some orange juice)

Peel, deseed and chop the pumpkin into largish chunks.
Toss the rest of the ingredients (excluding the orange) together with the pumpkin in a baking dish.
Bake, uncovered at about 180 degrees C for 45 mins.

As you're baking, you'll see that the pumpkin is starting to get dry - you can squeeze over the juice of half an orange after 15 mins of baking, and the other half an orange again after 30 mins.

Hooray! That's it!

Serve with some a little couscous salad of mint, tomato, onion, sultanas & spinach.


*Pomegranate molasses is a tangy sweet syrup - if you don't have any you could use a bit of maple syrup or sugar and some lemon juice.

savoury pumpkin pie

Lately we've been getting a lot of pumpkin in our weekly vegie box. I'm not a famed pumpkin lover, so my repertoire is pretty thin. My favourite way to eat pumpkin is usually with Moroccan / Middle Eastern flavours, hence this pie.


Super easy:
Roast some pumpkin pieces in olive oil (garlic optional)
Marinade the roasted pumpkin in lemon juice, ras el hanout, sesame seeds, sultanas (optional) & walnuts for about 30 mins.
Chuck it all on some pastry and bake.

Hooray!

I served it with this delish salad of steamed asparagus, avocado, apple & rocket in a dijon/lemon/olive oil dressing. Lovely.


This meal was totally super easy and quick, as are pretty much all the meals I've been cooking lately. I find cooking to be a huge way of procrastinating, I love cooking and can spend hours at a time, especially when I'm going through a macrobiotic phase. But, I'm trying to ramp up production in the business before Christmas, hence the easy recipes at the fore. It's better than take-out, right?

pumpkin: roasted pumpkin pasta

Now that we're getting our weekly vegie boxes, I'm a lot more focussed at cooking specific vegetable types. We recently had a BIG chunk of pumpkin in our vegie box, which called for, amongst other things, Roasted Pumpkin Pasta.

It was quite easy to make...

I peeled and roughly chopped my big pumpkin into bit sized strips.

I chucked them in an oven tray with some olive oil, salt & pepper, and roasted them at about 180 degrees for 1.5 hours, until they were lovely & sweet and the way roasted pumpkin should be.

Toward the end of the roasting time, I made a basic pasta sauce, with:
Leek &
Onion, fried until golden in
Olive oil, to which I added
Salt,
Pepper,
Chopped Tomatoes (from a can), &
Spinach leaves

When the sauce was ready & the spaghetti cooked, I tossed it all together with about half the pumpkin, and then served with more pumpkin on top, and some pistachios (yum!)

It was soooo nice. Recommended!

And sorry for lack of measurements, I NEVER measure when I cook savoury, but you'll figure it out!