Popeye Pasta

A few weeks ago we had Olive Oyl Pasta from Eat, Drink, and Be Vegan. Tonight we had pasta dedicated to Olive Oyl's other half, Popeye. Again, this recipe comes from ED&BV. It's penne pasta in a tomato based sauce with lots of fresh spinach wilted in at the end. Like everything else I've ever made from this book, it was phenomenal. Along with the pasta we had a spinach salad dressed with Annie's Naturals Tuscany Italian Dressing, and Dreena's Simplest Garlic Bread. I also whipped up some White Bean Spread (also from ED&BV) to slather on the garlic bread. The bean spread was delicious and I can't wait to use it on some veggie sandwiches tomorrow.

The Popeye Pasta was enjoyed by all.....as you can see, Stella had it all the way up to her forehead.

I had initially intended to "hide" the spinach by chopping it up real fine in the food processor, because I figured there was no way Mairin would touch it otherwise (although, funny enough, she loves spinach in her omelets). Well, turns out that Mairin was playing at a friends house and ate some things over there, so I figured she wouldn't be hungry for dinner at our house. I don't have to "hide" anything from Stella, so I just chopped the spinach coarsely and tossed it in. Mairin came home from playing, and in an attempt to stall bedtime a bit, decided that she didn't eat enough at her friend's house and needed some "pa nay nay" (our made up word for penne......remember Sha Nay Nay from Martin??). Of course, I was sure she wouldn't eat it when she saw that it had green in it...........I was wrong, she ate all but about 2 bites of her serving. She never even mentioned the green!!

Home-made spaghetti

In my post earlier today I told you about the sushi rolling kit that I got for Christmas. Well, tonight I got to use another of my Christmas gifts........the pasta rolling and cutting kit attachment for my Kitchen Aid mixer. This was my second attempt at making spaghetti, and both were fairly successful. Our last home made spaghetti meal didn't get blogged about because, while the spaghetti itself turned out fine, the meal did not. The recipe for whole wheat pasta that came with the kit calls for eggs.......well, this happened to be the meal that has now lead us to suspect an egg allergy in Stella, and let's just say that what transpired during that meal is NOT something you people want to be reading about on a food blog, enough said.

So, obviously, I didn't use eggs tonight. Instead, I used the same recipe only using "flax eggs" to replace the eggs that are called for. For anyone who doesn't know what "flax eggs" are, it's an egg substitute that you can make using ground flaxseed and water. You just blend up 1 Tbs of flaxseed, then whisk it into 3 Tbs of water until it becomes slimy like egg whites (the 1:3 ratio replaces 1 egg in most recipes). This is the first time I've used "flax eggs" so I wasn't sure how it would turn out............it turned out fine. The seeds don't get completely ground up, so you can still see some seeds and also a few brown specks throughout your dough (you probably wouldn't want to use "flax eggs" to replace eggs in say a nice airy white cake recipe, but they work just great for pasta and presumably bread, muffins, and the like).

This is a picture of the pasta sheets after they have been rolled out (excuse the ugly white counters, that's getting changed very, very soon). As you can see there are lots of brown flecks throughout them. I cut these sheets in half, making 8 sheets of pasta to cut into spaghetti.

This is the pasta after it has been cut into spaghetti. The picture doesn't really do it justice, but the fresh, cut pasta looks so beautiful.







I served the pasta topped with some "almost" home made tomato sauce. For the sauce I used one 28 oz can of crushed tomatoes, one 15 oz can of diced tomatoes, a few handfuls each of dried basil and oregano, and some salt and pepper. We also had some garlic bread based on the Simplest Garlic Bread recipe from Eat, Drink, and Be Vegan. I sliced a loaf of french bread, froze the slices, then once the slices were frozen I rubbed them with a clove of garlic that had been crushed, drizzled them with EVOO, and sprinkled them with some parmigiano reggiano and salt and pepper, then baked them at 375 until they were starting to brown.

I'm happy to report that our kids ate and liked this pasta. I was worried about the visible flaxseeds, and the fact that the pasta was brown (I blogged about Mairin's aversion to brown pasta once before). I did cover her pasta with sauce, and mix it up real good before I served it to her........she saw me making my plate and asked why my noodles were brown!! Mairin also had a guest for dinner tonight, and her friend ate a lot of pasta too. Now that we have the pasta roller you can expect to see some more yummy pasta dishes coming out of my kitchen in the future (I have a family of pasta lovers).