Easy pasta salad

So I’ve started eating more eggs because I kept getting hungry too quickly and realised I was not eating enough protein. I’ve also been keen on pasta recently, so although it is winter, I decided to make a salad. Well, a nice and warm one 🙂 I bought this pasta on a whim when I spotted it in the supermarket. It is fusilli bucati which I much prefer to solid fusilli. I guess it just looks more fun!

Eggs and fusilli bucati

I cooked more pasta and eggs than I needed so that I could have some leftovers for an easy lunch the next day. I didn’t combine it all together in case I wanted to tweak the ingredients a little and jazz it up. I love leftovers!

So the recipe (if you can call it one) is very simple…the quantities are up to you. In fact, the next time I intended to add in olives so that will be the first variation on this mélange – I just take a look at what is in the fridge and chuck it in!

Ingredients (serves 1)

• 1 hard-boiled egg, diced
• 3 tbs sweetcorn kernels (I used canned, it is winter after all!)
• 1/2 ripe avocado, diced
• 1 tbs grated extra mature cheddar (I used the delightfully named Tickler cheese)
• mayonnaise to taste
• 1/2 cup fusilli bucati, cooked and tossed in olive oil

Method

Combine the first five ingredients so that the mayonnaise coats everything well. Then mix in the pasta.

I tried following Delia’s tips on boiling eggs, which I pinned this week on a new board I started to collect cooking techniques. They worked perfectly!

It’s snowing on my page again! How lovely and festive. Much nicer than the tempestuous breezes that hit our little island from the end of last week, causing flooding, damage, injury and loss of life. I hope you guys are all ok…

…and here is an update of the next day’s salad, with added olives, wholegrain mustard and a bit of freshly ground black pepper. You can probably tell I fancied more mayo in this version too. Sorry, I only thought to take a photo of it when I’d almost scoffed it all (YUM!)

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Enjoying a tasty toastie again!

Aaaah… it’s been months since I’ve wanted to look at food, let alone blog about it – I’m sorry if you actually noticed it… But, things are getting better now. Thankfully, I haven’t gone off avocado or cheese, because these two ingredients look so good together on toast – phew! 🙂

I had to hand a pot of a Mexican-style salsa dip that someone made me take home from a pot luck this weekend. I find it a little acidic so I tried mixing it with some avocado and eating it just like that as a side garnish last night. This evening, after grating some cheese in preparation for a pasta supper later, I felt a bit peckish and decided to put together a quick grilled treat.

I buttered a piece of seeded, wholegrain bread straight from the freezer, mixed about a tablespoon of salsa in with two to three of avocado and spread it onto the slice. I then distributed a tablespoon of freshly grated extra mature cheddar as evenly across the top as I could. Four minutes under a medium preheated grill and I had a deliciously crisp, creamy, cheesy and slightly tangy toastie to go with a quickly thrown together plain omelette (yes, whilst the toast was in the oven, I felt even hungrier).

I can’t say this toastie is much of a looker, but it sure was moorish.. and my belly is thanking me for it now. Yum. Hope you have something cosy planned for the chillier evenings now (unless you live in parts of the world where it’s actually summer right now). Let me know if you’re making toasties!

Buttery Avocado and Egg Slices

As if you didn’t know already, I love avocados. I have been craving avocado for months, literally. I refrained from paying £1 each for miniature versions that have been hanging around the supermarkets lately, or risking the ones in my local roadside market not knowing whether they would all ripen too quickly once I’d taken them home. Then last week, I went to a trusty avocado seller and came away with a haul of five.

The avocado is a subtle fruit, rich and gentle, with its smooth buttery-green flesh encased in a glossy olive-brown skin. There is something inexplicably captivating about the texture and flavour that I never grow tired of. I love to eat it with a spoon, straight out of the shell. Scoop by scoop, savouring each mouthful and regretting it every time I’ve scraped the last stubborn slither out.

I also love eggs (and lavender – I’ll come to that tomorrow). Versatile, nutritious, flavoursome. Alchemy in a fragile shell. Absolutely delightful and satisfying. Perfect for someone feeling ravenous before supper.

I wouldn’t even call this a recipe. I simply halved an avocado, cut some of it off the bottom to create a flat base and gently heated it in a frying pan. I cracked an egg into the hole and continued to cook until the whites were no longer transparent.

I didn’t want to end up over-frying the avocado so I had to cover it to make sure the egg was cooked. Next time I’ll try heating extra oil on the side and basting the egg during cooking to get a sunny side up properly! No matter, it was absolute yumminess served simply with some freshly ground black pepper on top.