Yay, it's almost the weekend

28^th September 2018

Every day is a fresh start.

But not for me today, I do solemnly swear that today I’m going to eat what I fancy, and I’m thinking a curry from a proper curry house, not had one since moms birthday week back in July and it’s calling me.  Oh and now I know I can order it online now for later, well, that’s proper dangerous!

It’s going to be another glorious day weather wise, I shall be spending my afternoon at WW training, I might leave early so I can go do a bit of me shopping before the training, if I’m disrupting moms routine anyway I might as well kill two birds with one stone.  I’m glad the trainings afternoon not morning as it’s going to take me a little bit more time to recover from the last two days meetings, cooking 6 times in them, yesterday I only had Carol to help,she’s amazing and I’ve never been more grateful that when a member offered to wash up for us after the last meeting of the day yesterday, we were both shattered.

Whilst cooking I was reminded of this recipe which I told some members I’d blog, it’s delicious, if you have kids they’ll love helping you make the pasta and if you were in my meetings this week you could just make the pasta and add it to that sauce we made instead of the gnocchi!

Spinach pici pasta

Serves 4, Cooks In 50 minutes,

16sp per serving if you drizzle a tsp of oil over dish, 14sp if you leave that bit out.

Difficulty - Not too tricky

200g baby spinach

300g Tipo 00 pasta flour or plain flour (30sp), plus extra for dusting

olive oil (2tbsp - 9sp)

4 cloves of garlic

½ teaspoon dried red chilli flakes

200g baby courgettes

320g ripe cherry tomatoes, on the vine

50g pine nuts (11sp)

½ a bunch of fresh basil, (15g)

50g Parmesan cheese (7sp)

extra virgin olive oil (1tsp per plate = 2sp per plate)

In a food processor, blitz the spinach and flour until a ball of dough forms, letting the machine do all the work. Touch the dough – it shouldn’t be sticky, you want a play dough consistency, so add a little more flour, if needed. To make the pici, simply tear off 2cm balls of dough and roll them out into long thin sausage shapes – think fine green beans – on a clean surface (the beauty is that they’re all different, so get little helpers involved, if you can). Cook the pici straight away, or leave them to dry out for a few hours, or even overnight.

Put a large pan of salted water on to boil. Put a large frying pan on a medium heat with 2 tablespoons of olive oil (9sp). Peel, finely slice and add the garlic, along with the chilli flakes. Finely slice and add the courgettes, then halve and add the tomatoes. Cook it all for 5 minutes, then stir in the pine nuts and add a ladleful of boiling water. Leave on the lowest heat while you cook the pasta.

Add the pici to your pan of boiling salted water. If it’s freshly rolled it will only need about 5 minutes, but if you’ve let it dry give it 8 to 10 minutes, checking on it to make sure you get lovely al dente pasta. Drain, reserving a mugful of cooking water, then toss through the veg. Reserving the baby basil leaves, finely slice the bigger ones and stir into the pan with most of the finely grated Parmesan, loosening with a little reserved water, if needed. Divide between your warm plates and serve with a few drips of extra virgin olive oil (if you do that's extra SP's, 1tsp is 2sp, with the remaining Parmesan and the baby basil leaves sprinkled over.

Anyway, that’s me for today, I’m off to sort mom, dogs already walked, here’s to surviving today in any way possible, hoping moms better than she was yesterday – Alzheimer’s sucks but it will not win.