This pasta dish is a family favourite. Sweet and salty is one of my favourite taste combinations. For the die hard meat eater, this dish would also be nice with some chicken breast tossed through. Just slice and brown through before cooking the onions, then add it back in with the spinach or rocket at the end of the cooking to reheat.

Serves 4 – just halve for less. (more…)

Why make bolognaise from scratch when you can get it pretty cheap and easy from a bottle? That’s what I thought anyway until I didn’t have any in the cupboard and decided to make it myself. I have never gone back to the store bought bottled pasta sauce.

This makes a very rich, tasty bolognaise. And it’s not that much harder or more time consuming than the bottled variety. It is a foundation recipe, though. You can add anything you like: olives, sun dried tomatoes, carrots, zucchini, corn, kidney beans, extra garlic, fresh herbs, spices… endless possibilities. Or you could remove ingredients that you don’t like or don’t have on hand like the capsicum or mushrooms. A tasty variation is adding a couple of crushed cloves to the sauce. It adds a subtle but lovely aroma to your bolognaise.

Of course, instead of serving this over spaghetti, you could make a simple white sauce, layer with a few sheets of pasta, grate some cheese over the top and have lasagne instead.

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This dish was inspired by a recipe that used tuna instead of chicken, so a tin of tuna makes a good substitute. Alternatively, this dish could be made to use up leftover roast chicken or BBQ chicken, reducing the preparation and cooking time as well as the cost. This makes 2 very large bowls of pasta, add a little extra of the cream, tomato paste, chicken and peas to serve 4.

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Tasty, restaurant quality pasta carbonara is really quick, easy and inexpensive to make at home. Admittedly it’s not going to be the healthiest meal of the week, but it will taste awesome and is a great quick meal for busy nights. All in all, it takes about 20 minutes to get this meal on the table.

Purists will argue that this is not a ‘real’ carbonara recipe as it has cream in it, but I’m not a purist, I like to cook what I like to eat. I’ve tried to give amounts for the ingredients, but taste as you go and add as much flavouring as you like, which is how I cook.

The key to it’s great taste is fresh parmesan, not packet or freeze dried stuff in a jar. You pay a bit more, but because of it’s strong flavour a little goes a long way, and it lasts months in the fridge, so it ends up being good value. You could use low fat cream, but… the real stuff will taste heaps better and real, whole foods are nice and healthy as part of a balanced diet.

The recipe is for two, so double it or adjust to feed as many as required.

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