Daily Unadventures in Cooking

Five of my well-loved and easy pasta recipes, perfect for a novice cook or an easy weeknight meal.

A macaroni and cheese recipe should be rich and gooey, and just a little bit bad for you. This version is an interpretation of classic comfort food which adds rosemary, sweet winter squash and some mustard for balance.

This Asian noodle salad is a healthy meal in itself which is perfect for a potluck or a packed lunch. The crunchy fresh vegetables bring the vibrant colour and the chicken adds a dash of protein to these tangy peanut noodles.

This lasagne is quite different then the traditional american lasagna with no tomato sauce at all. The dried mushrooms give the sauce a rich, earthy depth of flavour and the bechamel is creamy and delicious.

What would you do if you had one black truffle? Would you use it sparingly, or use it all up in one amazing meal?  Amazingly meal, obviously.  According to Marcella Hazan, “This dish should be reserved for lovers“. Yes, yes indeed reading that was enough to convince me this was the recipe to use [...]

I bought a large bag of parsnips from a local farm stand last week in my quest to eat more local and more seasonally.   When it came time to use them I didn’t feel like having plain roasted parsnips so I decided to put them right into our pasta dinner. It is the sweetness [...]

This Fall lasagna is not your typical meat and bechamel lasagna, classics are delicious but why not try something more seasonal? First roast up cubed squash with spices and hazelnuts and that becomes your basic sauce.  Then wilt the kale into some tomatoes and start layering your sauces with your noodles, putting goat’s cheese and [...]

Here is another variation on a classic Italian pasta dish. Recently I made a healthy spaghetti carbonara, this week it is spaghetti puttanesca. I started with the classic recipe but rather then using anchovies and olives to make it salty I used feta and olives. To make it a bit healthier I added [...]

When egg yolks are used in a pasta which feature vegetables it doesn’t have to be heavy at all and the eggs give it such a delectable and distinctive flavour, perfect for a vegetarian pasta recipe.

After trying this pasta I am totally in love with rapini and looking for more rapini recipes. It is bitter and nutty, and so lovely with the salty feta.

Shrimp with white wine and garlic is always a popular combination, but when you add in the local tomatoes and baby leeks it brings a beautiful sweetness to this classic dish.

This recipe is about some beautiful eggplant I purchased at the Kitsilano Farmers Market. All I had to do was saute it for the right amount of time with some fresh zucchini and kale, toss with some sweet tomatoes to balance out it’s bitterness and I was rewarded with the perfect healthy comfort food. [...]

So, I bet at least half of you are wondering, what are garlic scapes? Good question. I didn’t know myself until quite recently, and this was the first time I have ever eaten or cooked with them. The scapes are the top of the garlic plant. If you are growing garlic and you [...]

I love the combination of white beans, kale and sausage in soups and pasta. But…. it isn’t necessarily the most wholesome meal so I tried to scale it back a little bit by using turkey sausage, whole wheat pasta and reduced fat Parmesan (but still the good stuff). Some recipes do not like this [...]

Fresh homemade pasta is such a treat! You might as well make twice as much and freeze the fresh pasta.

The salty feta is such a great contrast to the sweetness of the shrimp in this tomato based pasta recipe.

We got a really good deal on a big log of goat cheese and Costco so we keep having to ask ourselves, “What can we eat with goat cheese tonight?”. Although the answer to that is clearly: Anything, it is still worth making it good.

Homemade pasta is like nothing else. Have you made your own pasta yet? If you haven’t you are totally missing out. It is more work for certain but it is an entirely different creature then the packaged stuff. Yes, even the fresh packaged stuff.

I actually made this dish because I was making some miso glazed sablefish, a soba noodle salad seemed like a logical pairing but I didn’t want to make the version with sesame oil in case it overpowered the fish. This is a very similar but definitely different recipe. I may finally use up that [...]

Even though our thanksgiving was more then a month ago there have been so many yummy pumpkin related recipes on the blogs I wasn’t able to help myself from buying a can of pumpkin. A big can. Sadly it is now gone but not before I made two batches of muffins, pumpkin oats and this [...]