Taste & Create: Prawn Scampi

This was a tasty little pasta dish I whipped up for Taste & Create this month...

I was once again paired with the lovely Tamy of 3 Sides of Crazy... I was entranced by her recipe for Lemon Garlic Shrimp Scampi... and you should be too!

The finished dish was light and refreshing, easily whipped up after a long work day!!

:)

Taste & Create: Mushroom Ragout

This month I did my first Taste & Create in months and months and months and... ages!

Taste & Create is a monthly blogging event where the lovely Min of the Bad Girl's Kitchen pairs you up with another blogger and you each get to make, and report on one of each other's recipes.

This month I was paired with Min herself and I chose to experiment with her recipe for Mushroom Ragout... I followed the index link for FAST recipes because I didn't want to have to make anything too complicated. Complicated and/or time consuming are just not valid options when you're sharing a kitchen with 11 other people (not to mention their friends)!

And it was a good choice. As Min mentions in her own post - this ragout has bacon in it! How could it be anything but a good thing!

It came together very quickly with minimal effort and dishes and maximum flavour! I served mine over boiled brussel sprouts, rather than pasta - but this is a recipe for a sauce! Put it on whatever you want! It'd be awesome in a toastie-pie sandwich!

This is a tasty ragout that I've already made twice! I thoroughly recommend it!

Buttons and Bows

I may have mentioned this before... but I'm not a very effective preparer of "simple" dishes... the Great Alison Holst describes the following dish as a "well balanced family dinner which can be cooked in half an hour in one pan"... she neglects to add the bit "unless, of course, you are Kat. In which case this'll probably take an hour and a half several pans a couple of pots and maybe even a little floor-space for good measure. But don't worry! Your flat mates will love it!"

And, inexplicably, they do! This is not my favourite dish ever... but it comes to you highly requested by one of my most favourite people ever... and I aim to please! :)

Even I recognise that this is a very cute dish!

The flavour and sauciness for this dish comes almost entirely from a can of condensed soup - so make sure you pick a flavour you like from a brand you trust! I usually pick mushroom soup and then bulk up the flavour with some combination of; shit-loads of garlic, onion, Worcester sauce, soy sauce, chilli sauce, oregano, mushrooms etc... It's a stone soup type recipe!

The bows are provided by the pasta shape... and the buttons come, ideally from carrots and courgettes... but if, like me you don't have any courgettes to hand make buttons, bows and pearls! Substitute in any veggies you have lying around! Make this dish your own...

You can bulk out the greens with salad, as I did here - but with all the veggies in the dish proper salad isn't a necessary addition to make balanced-ness.

And so Joshee, I have for you (at long last!) the recipe for buttons and bow - enjoy!

Marmite Spaghetti

... or, in my case, Vegemite Spaghetti. Because that's what I had. Also, Australian Vegemite is closer (in flavour, but not texture) to English Marmite than New Zealand Marmite is... Make sense? No? Good.

This is another Nigella recipe, and a absolute, bottom-of-the-barrel cupboard scratching recipe. Tasty though! Well worth making even when you do have sufficient ingredients to make something else.

do you think the pasta looks tastier from this angle...

The result is a salty, savoury pasta which is tasty when served under cheese. In much the same way that toast can be made tasty and savoury by being served beneath marmite (or vegemite) and cheese.

The sauce is simple enough to make... and if you want to feel as if you're eating a balanced meal - add some peas at the last second to the pasta water for a splash of green!

...or this angle?

I won't get into the vegemite vs marmite debate... you can suit yourself! Either will work just fine... :)

Don't-Ask-Don't-Tell Pasta Puttanesca

Why don't ask, don't tell? Because puttanesca sauce contains three things people commonly believe they don't like: olives, capers and anchovies.

WAIT!!!

Before you give up on this recipe in disgust - know this, I loathe anchovies and am only just learning to tolerate capers (olives and I on the other hand... well put it this way - for much of my childhood I preferred olives to chocolate) but "a la" puttanesca is one of my favourite ways to eat pasta! Even when I've made it myself and I know what's in there!

See? Looks pretty harmless, really...

If you really, really can't stomach the idea of anchovies, you can substitute them for bacon or salami, I suppose. And the capers for gherkins. The olives? Pick 'em out you lazy so and so's...

Thus, if you're feeling brave, read on for the recipe:

Eggs Poached in Marinara Sauce

I'm feeling guilty. For being a bad, naughty not-blogging bloger-er...

I'm at home for the summer/(hopefully) next six months now - but I still have some student goodies to pass on to y'all when I can be bothered... :)

Because, it's not as if I being doing nothing since I left you all with Taste and Create in November... I've been doing all sorts of things!

• reading other people's blogs...
• job hunting, wildly unsuccessfully... anybody looking for a Kat to join their work force out there? I'm a nice person, I promise!
• being entirely too successful with a sourdough bug
• organising my 21st Birthday Party (my actual Birthday falls on a Wednesday this year = not so good for parties...)
• sitting my "summer" paper - I've got a 10/12 average thus far - go me! :)
• trying to convince my boyfriend that catching up with me might actually be fun (varying success on that one...)
• moving and stacking firewood (I tell you, when I grow-up-and-get-rich-and-have-six-houses they will ALL have gas fires! No more bloody fire wood for me!)
• not tidying my room...

See? Lots of things! Just... not blogging.

Fear not! I have for you a revolutionary recipe taken direct from Katie the College Culinarian (she's one of my favourites): Eggs Poached in Marinara Sauce!

This recipe, if, indeed one can really call it a recipe, is so simple, delicious and wonderful that you'll wonder to yourself "...and I didn't come up with this all by myself because...?!" and then you will cook it twice in one week. At least, that's what I did.

The first time I "made" my own marinara sauce - the second time (as photographed here) I used shop-bought sauce but threw in some peas and spinach for greens. Any good, shop bought, tomato based sauce that you can stand eating fairly unadorned would work here... I served it all over pasta to ensure that Master Joshee was able to have his fill.

There is an egg in there, see?

As you may have guessed by the "cook[ed] it twice in one week" this will fast become a staple!