Pasta & sauce

Well, there's so much to share - where do I start? How about a nice, easy pasta meal? This is what we had on Wednesday - a better alternative to those jars of sauce that are full of preservatives and devoid of flavour.

Start out with your vegetables and meat. I've used spring onions, cherry tomatoes, garlic and a red pepper here, with the leftovers of a haslet - this is a traditional Lincolnshire meatloaf made with pork, breadcrumbs and herbs.

You'll find it in your supermarket delicatessen, usually the cheapest sliced cold meat there is that actually is meat (as opposed to those teddy bear/smiley face "luncheon meat" things), but I buy them whole from local butchers. I used to work in a butcher shop where we made them out the back, so I've a fair idea how to judge a good one!

There's an amazing tomato "project" going on in Lincolnshire. They're using the methane generated by the rubbish at the local tip to warm greenhouses where they grow summer fruits all year round - how cool is that? They don't seem to have much of an internet presence at the moment so I can't give a link, but I'll ask the guy I know who's involved with it to throw me a bone there so I've got something more to give you later. I think this is happening elsewhere too, though.

Anyway, having chopped everything up it was a simple case of draining the pasta, leaving it in the colander while I reused the pan to cook the sauce. I warmed a bit of rapeseed oil and put the veg in, stirring it occasionally till it was softened, then added the garlic and haslet. I've been putting the garlic in later recently to stop it from burning in the pan, which tends to happen when you're still trying to figure out the vagaries of electric hobs. Once the meat had started to release its juices, I put in a whole pot of half-fat crème fraîche:

...and mixed it in till it was heated through, grinding in a bit of salt and pepper to taste. The Co-operative's crème fraîche is from British dairy farms, so I'm using that at the moment, with a mental note to look into that as I don't want to let the supermarkets off the "clear provenance" hook just for putting a British flag on the pot!

Then I tipped the pasta in and mixed it round on a very low heat (to stop the pasta sticking to the pan) till that was also heated through again. Now, if I'd been entertaining guests, then at this stage I would probably have put the whole lot in a nice oven-to-table dish, grated a couple of different kinds of cheese over the top and put it in the oven to melt the top. But it was just me and the kids, so I spooned it straight out of the pan onto the plates, and just grated cheese over the top:

I have biomass heating here thanks to my landlord's forward-looking attitude, for which I pay a flat rate each month for unlimited fuel that comes from the woods on the estate, and which they send round by tractor. As I'm also off the mainline sewers and have my own septic tank, it means my water bills are also very small. So this speeds up cooking quite a bit, as I can use the water that's sitting there, already hot, in the pipes, to pre-heat saucepans and a lot less time is spent on the hob waiting for water to boil.

That all means this meal is very quick - by the time I'm done chopping the veg and meat, the pasta is almost ready, so it's from scratch to table in about 15 minutes. But even your on-grid urbanite, using two pans, could have it on the table in 20 - 25 minutes, I expect.

And there are plenty of variations on the same theme you can do. For example, sometimes I set some chopped ham and crushed garlic marinading in soy sauce earlier in the day (or the previous evening) and that replaces the haslet, adding a different flavour that my kids can never go back for enough extra helpings of. And obviously you can completely omit the meat for any number of vegetarian varieties.