KLEPAS.ORG

The problem

So alone at home with Christina (the Chinese student living with us doing her English masters at the local Can­berra Uni), parents off lodging for the weekened with Desiree (sister) and we become hungry.

Thus the ques­tion arose: what to cook? Some­thing veg­e­tar­ian!

And this is what I came up with:

Ingredients

Serves 2

• 3 diced toma­toes
• 2 finely cubed/diced cap­sicums (using green/yellow with add more colour to the dish)
• 4 finely chopped cloves of garlic
• 1/2 tsp. of salt
• 1/2 tsp. of black ground pepper
• 1 tsp. of tobasco
• 3 tsp. of any sun-​dried tomato pesto sauce
• small hand­full of finely chopped black olives (not stuffed)
• 100ml of red wine
• hand­full of chopped chives
• hand­full of chopped parsley
• 200g of whole­meal noodles
• veg­etable oil
• 1 tbs. of flour

What to do

Fill a medium-​sized sauce-​pan 3/4 full with water and allow to boil. Feel free to add any chicken stock or salt if you wish and then come the noodles once the water is boiling.

Add 50ml of veg­etable oil to a large pan and allow to heat. Once hot enough, add the finely chopped cloves of garlic and gently stir. Wait until the garlic begins to turn golden and then add all the toma­toes. Stir to prevent burning, though the water from the toma­toes ought to do that anyway. Add the chopped/diced/cubed cap­sicum to the pan as well.

Allow this to simmer for a few minutes, while gently stiring. Feel free to begin to add small quan­ti­ties of the red wine to the mixture. Now add the 3 tsp. of your pesto sauce and con­tinue to mix. Add the rest of the wine now while con­tin­u­ing to stir gently. The mixture will prob­a­bly be rather thin, so add 1 tbs. of flour slowly while stiring it in to avoid clumps. Add the salt, pepper and tobasco to taste.

Now add your finely chopped chives, parsley and black olives. These don’t require much heating so they are added at this point, a minute or three before taking the pan off the heat. Con­tinue to stir the sauce gently for this time and then it’s done.

By now the noodles ought to be ready as well.

As for chang­ing things, of course. I just impro­vised and made things up as I went along so chang­ing and adding to this dish would prob­a­bly work really well. For example I could see adding basil to the herbs or using dif­fer­ent noodles quite easily. The noodles need not be whole­meal at all, I just like them because they fill more and have a nice colour. You could easily add meat to this dish, either using mince or some­thing I rather like which are meat-​filled tortelli­nis. Or if you’d like to retain this as a veg­e­tar­ian dish, then you could use spinach filled tortelli­nis instead. Yay for tortelli­nis!

Overall served well with parme­san cheese sprin­kled ontop as well as any par­tic­u­lar herbs. As for drinks, red wine is the obvious choice. Per­son­ally, I’d rec­om­mend a Lam­br­usco.

I was going to make some photos but the camera wasn’t handy and we were too hungry. Next time.

Cheers and enjoy.