Apple, Walnut and Blue Cheese Pasta!

A double bill today! Whoop! (Read: slight backlog that I'm only just dealing with...) But this is a really tasty sauce, absolutely chock-full of flavour, mixing strong cheesy flavours with the sweeter tang of apple.

I'd got a bit bored of making pasta sauces that were centred around using tomato (oh, irony, serving with a tomato...) and so I decided to try and think outside the box and made something with apples instead. It worked really well, and can be varied depending on the kind of pasta etc that you've got. I used Spinach and Ricotta tortellini with strong cheese in the sauce, as that kind of pasta is a bit more neutral-tasting, but equally you could leave out the cheese from the sauce and use a stronger-tasting filled pasta, such as a Walnut and Gorgonzola variety from Sainsbury's, which is delicious. Equally, gorgonzola or a similar strong cheese would work in place of the blue cheese I used in the sauce.

Ingredients (for 3);

• 2 packs Spinach & Ricotta tortellini
• 200ml cider
• 3 tablespoons creme fraiche
• 2 Royal Gala apples
• 50g walnuts
• Pinch powdered ginger
• Pinch powdered cinnamon
• 50g blue cheese
• Olive oil

Alright folks...let's cook;

1. Chop the apples into relatively small chunks. Place in a bowl of water to prevent brownage.
2. Heat the olive oil in a high-sided frying pan, and add the apple when hot.
3. Add the ginger/cinnamon to the apples, and fry them off for a couple of minutes.
4. Pour the cider in with the apples.
5. Take the pan off the heat, then add the creme fraiche. Stir it all through, before putting back on the hob. 
6. Once that comes up to simmering point, turn the heat down a little and leave it to reduce for a bit. 
7. Now for the anger management bit - get your walnuts, put them in a bag, do it up tight and hit them with a rolling pin. You don't want massive great bits of walnut in the sauce, better to break them up a bit.
8. Meanwhile, bring a saucepan full of salted water up to the boil and chuck in the pasta. This should only take about 5 minutes if you're using filled pasta. 
9. While the pasta's cooking, crumble the cheese into the sauce and stir it through until it's melted in to make a deliciously cheesy mess. Add your pulverised walnuts at the same time.
10. Once the pasta's done, drain it, then mix everything together, sauce and all. Then it's just a case of nomming down.

Pure Green Stir-Fry!

In my mortal crockery, sits a stir-fry of...purest green! (Blackadder anyone? Anyway) I was in the mood for something 1. quick and 2. really, really, healthy the other day. It was because I had eaten nought but crap for a few days, being ill with a cold man flu. So, I grabbed a few things from the shops to compliment some stuff we'd already got at home, and lo, after 20 minutes from starting the prep to plating, a stir-fry of absolutely pure green. It felt healthy to look at. Aside from being quick, it was truly bursting with flavour and just delicious, if I do say so myself.

Ingredients (for 2 people);

• 4 spring onions
• 1 courgette
• 1 medium green pepper
• 1 bag of pea shoots
• 3 tablespoons Thai green curry paste
• 100ml coconut milk
• Juice of 1 lime
• 1 teaspoon fresh ginger, finely chopped
• Handful of cashew nuts, unsalted.
• Noodles
• Sesame seeds
• Sesame oil

Let the games begin;

1. Heat the sesame oil in a wok/high-sided frying pan. Finely chop the spring onions, and when the oil's hot, throw the spring onions and the ginger in.
2. Chop the pepper up into decent sized chunks and the courgette into sticks, and for the moment, put to one side.
3. Put the sesame seeds under the grill to toast them. Keep checking on them until they're browned, at which point take them out!
4. Put the pepper, courgette, curry paste and coconut milk in the wok/pan with the onions and ginger, and while keeping on a high heat, keep the whole lot moving. 
5. Add the lime juice to the mix, stirring it well the while time. If the mixture is still a bit liquidy at this point, don't worry - on a high heat, provided you keep stirring it, it'll reduce down quickly.
6. In a separate frying pan, heat some more sesame oil, and when hot, add the noodles and sesame seeds. These should only take a couple of minutes to cook. 
7. Right before service, add the cashews and pea shoots to the green mix, and stir them through only long enough to heat them.
8. Serve it up! Noodles on the base, then the stir-fry on top. Enjoy (and have a drink handy, it was quite hot)!

Butternut Squash Cannelloni!

Hello, and welcome to a new episode of AVD, live from The Sticks in rural Norfolk. LOL. Well, I am out in rural Norfolk, but it's lovely. Our current kitchen, while in line for a re-vamp is...shall I say retro? It's not in possession of the greatest cooker known to humankind, but it does a job for now, and it still makes things hot so can we ask too much more? Without any further ado, I present my most recent creation, butternut squash cannelloni!

Presentation, admittedly a but scrappy, does not affect the fact that this was damn tasty. It's straightforward, looks and sounds good, just give yourself plenty of prep time to cook the squash first.

Ingredients;
Cannelloni & Filling

• Cannelloni tubes - allow 3-4 per person
• 1 butternut squash
• Handful of pine nuts
• Grated cheddar cheese 
• Pinch (and really not much) powdered nutmeg

Sauce

• 1 tin chopped tomatoes
• 2 tablespoons green pesto*
• Grated cheese to garnish

The Doings;

1. Now, there are two ways to do the squash, and you can do steps 3-5 while it's cooking. Whatever you do though, preheat the oven to about 180-200 degrees/Gas mark 6 first;
   1: Peel the squash (you'll want to use a sharp knife, skin's a bit tough for a peeler), chop it into smallish chunks, then bung it in a pan of boiling water and leave it for 15-20 minutes until it's really soft OR
   2: . Slice the squash in half lengthways (top to bottom), scoop out the seeds (doesn't matter about the stringy bits too much), cut a criss-cross pattern into the flesh of the squash and then stick it in said pre-heated oven for about 20 minutes. 
2. Either method will leave you with some easily mashable squash, which is what you need to do: Mash. If you used method 1 to cook it, drain the water, then use a fork or a masher to do the dirty work - method 2, scoop it out of the skin and do the same thing.
3. Put the pine nuts under a medium grill until they are lightly toasted. 
4. Get your cannelloni tubes and place them in an ideally oblong (for logistical ease, though anything will do) shallow dish.
5. Put the tinned tomatoes and pesto in a mixing bowl and mix them together - it should be a relatively liquid-y mixture. 
6. Now for the slightly tricky part! Whack the mashed squash in a mixing bowl along with the pine nuts, nutmeg and grated cheddar, give it a good ol' stir through, then spoon it into the cannelloni.
7. The best way to do so, through trial and error, is to stand the tubes on one end and spoon it in the top. Don't lift it up though...it'll just fall out. It happened several times.
8. Get the tubes all rearranged in the dish once filled, pour the sauce over so it's fully covering the pasta, put some tin foil over the top of the dish and put it in the oven.
9. After about 15 minutes, take the dish out, remove the foil, sprinkle some cheese on top then stick it back in the oven for 5-10 minutes. Then, serve and enjoy!

I'd say to serve it with salad or something - in the above picture, we've done a medley of raw veg: broccoli, baby corns, cauliflower and green pepper. 

*Technically, most green pesto that you get in shops in fact isn't vegetarian, because it contains grana padano cheese - it uses rennet, sourced from animal innards, as a stabiliser. So if you're (unlike me) super-veggie, then you can either buy from health food stores or make your own! Just Google it.