Recipe Tuesday - Baked Feta & Tomato Pasta

There is nothing like the taste of a freshly ripened, home grown, cherry tomato.   This year, we’re having a bumper harvest of them.  Fortuitously, someone mentioned an internet craze for baked feta and tomato pasta.  After a couple of sessions testing other people’s recipes, this is my version.  It feeds 4.

Ingredients

500g punnet of Cherry Tomatoes (or the largest you can get), washed

200g block Feta Cheese (get the proper Greek stuff, made with sheep/goat milk)

2 cloves garlic, crushed

80g jar salted anchovies in olive oil (or use a tin.  Don’t drain it.)

1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil (the good stuff)

360g dried pasta

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 220C.
2. Put the Feta into a lasagne dish, arrange the cherry tomatoes around it, together with the garlic.  Pour over the olive oil, attempting to coat as many of the cherry tomatoes as possible.
3. Turn the Feta over, twice, to coat with olive oil.
4. Dot the anchovies around the dish and pour the jar’s oil over the contents of the dish.
   
   
   
5. Bake at 220C for 45 minutes.
6. Meanwhile, at the 30 minute mark, boil a large kettle or two of water, pour it into your largest saucepan and bring the water back to the boil..  Add a pinch of salt, then pour in the dried pasta.  Bring back to the boil again, turn down and simmer for the amount of time specified on the packet.  (In my case, 11 minutes.). Once cooked, drain and return the pasta to the saucepan.
7. After 45 minutes in the oven, the tomatoes should be cooked and the Feta browned.
   
    
8. Remove the lasagna dish from the oven, and mash the contents together.  Stir into the drained pasta and serve.

It isn’t pretty but, OMG, is it tasty!

- Pam

A very un-Kosher pasta dish

Sometimes, a recipe comes from almost nowhere.  That's what happened with this.  A chance glance at a photograph on the BBC Good Food website, led to me dreaming up this recipe on my drive home from work a couple of weeks ago.  It was so visceral, I could almost taste it.  In the end, I gave into my cravings, dug out the non-kosher cookware and came up with this:

Bacon and cream cheese pasta

Serves 4 to 6

Ingredients

150g bacon trimmings

1 onion sliced
1 clove garlic, crushed
100g mushrooms, sliced
250ml dry white wine
200g cream cheese
30g or so of freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese (real "parmesan" not that Danish fake rubbish)
500g pasta shapes (I used quills because that is what I had)

Method

• Put the water on to boil for the pasta.  Cook the pasta according to the packet's directions.
• Meanwhile, prepare the onion, garlic and mushrooms and proceed with the rest of the recipe.
• In a non-stick frying pan, dry fry the bacon until the fat begins to run.  Stir occasionally.
• Once there is fat in the frying pan, add the onion and continue frying it until the onion becomes glassy/clear.

  

• Stir in the mushrooms and the garlic.  Continue frying, stirring occasionally, until the mushrooms have made water and it has evaporated.
• Pour in the white wine and bring to the boil.  Stir in the cream cheese and keep stirring until it has melted and the sauce is creamy.  Switch off the heat and stir in the parmesan.

 

• Drain the pasta and return it to the saucepan.  Pour over the sauce.  Season with freshly ground pepper and serve.

  

 

Enjoy.

 

- Pam