Favorite Dish no. 1 – Spaghetti with Oven tomatoes

This really is one of my favorite dishes and I believe I really do make this at least once a week. This has everything to do with the fact that it takes very little time in the kitchen but is very, very tasty. It actually is a recipe my friend Marie made for me about ten years ago and I’ve been making it ever since.  It’s all about the tomatoes, since this is a product Germans are better in producing than the Dutch I especially make it a lot since we’re here.

I’m not a recipe writer and don’t know anything about the proportions, but I’ll try my best to explain. Just take a lot of tomatoes, about twice as much as you would normally use and the smaller ones are really better (about one size up from cherry tomatoes are the best). Cut them up and put them in a baking dish with a lot of olive oil, garlic from the press, balsamic vinegar and fresh thyme. Now the key is that you actually can make any time during the day because it can be in the oven for three hours, for just an hour or even a half. The shorter it stays in the oven the higher you should put the temperature, I always try and put it in the oven at least two hours before I want to eat and then put the temperature around 120C. (when late and I just have half an hour in the oven I put it up to 200C) Just stir it every now and then and adjust the temperature to make it go faster or slow it down. I always taste the juice half an hour before dinner to sometimes add a little honey to sweeten thing up because a lot in this dish depends on the quality of tomatoes. The nice thing in this dish is that it actually dries the tomatoes a bit which makes them sweeter and concentrates the taste of the tomatoes very much. After taking it out of the oven and seasoning with salt and pepper I add a few hand fresh basil leaves.

Serving is done with pasta, my favorite is spaghetti, and cheeses. I always use parmesan and when I have it in the fridge or am well prepared with fresh soft goat cheese on top. Please do try, it really is a very, very good dish. Especially with small children, in my family everybody loves it when I make it.

Pasta Puttanesca

Pasta is something I just could eat every single day. Especially spaghetti. And if the sauce is good, you definitely do not need a lot of it to make your dish delicious. I always like the puttanesca pasta so much for it is so simply to make, yet it is very tastful with a nice salty bite to it.

A good plate of pasta with a tomato sauce.

Dinner for 2

1 shallot, chopped

2 cloves of garlic, chopped

4 filets of anchovies, chopped

40 gr of black olives, chopped (green ones also will do just fine)

1 tbsp. capers

1 can of tomatoes

250 gr spaghetti

20 gr parmesan, grated

50 gr fresh goats cheese, moldered

A handful of fresh basil

Fry the shallot, garlic and anchovies until it softens. Add the olives and capers. Fry for a minute before adding a can of tomatoes, 50 ml water and salt and pepper. Bring to a boiling point, turn the heat low and let it simmer for about half an hour.

Pasta with mushrooms and green beans

After a very busy day I am craving a big plate of pasta, for which I used leftovers from the fridge combined in cream sauce.

Pasta with greens beans and mushrooms

Meal for 2

150 gr of green beans
2 chopped up shallots
1 tsp. olive oil
1 tsp. of fresh thyme

250 gr mushrooms, sliced

Juice of ½ a lemon

150 ml cream

150 gr pasta

1 tbsp. capers

Cook the beans in 3 cm of boiling water for about five minutes, set aside. 

Spicy Shrimp Pasta

Blue Mondays. The start of the week, the end of a perfect weekend. The days are getting shorter and shorter.  We really are longing for a sunny, but easy to prepare dish so a light Shrimp pasta it is!

Shrimp Spaghetti 
Light meal for 2

250 gr of spaghetti

250 gr of shrimp

1 tsp. sunflower oil

2 cloves of garlic, sliced

1 chili pepper, grinded

1 cm fresh ginger, chopped

1 tbsp. butter

½ lime

Rocket

Cook the spaghetti in plenty of salted water. Fry the shrimp a couple of minutes in sunflower oil, add the garlic, chili pepper and ginger. Add the butter, stir till melted, press the lime above and then stir in the spaghetti so it’s nicely covered in butter. Add a few hands of rocket and ready you are.

Meatball Spaghetti

A real classic. My husband loves this recipe very, very much and when I want to surprise him once in a while I can most definitely make him very happy with this recipe. It does take some serious time though: the longer the tomato sauce is cooked, the better it tastes. Rolling the meatballs also isn't a two minute job either.

What also is important with the tomatoe sauce - as I learned from Jamie Oliver - is to try not to bust the tomatoes in the cooking process, but to wait until the cooking is done. This way the sauce will be more sweet . Breaking the tomatos in an earlier stage tend to make the sauce a bit more souer.

Spaghetti with meatballs in a tomato sauce

Dinner for 4

For the tomato sauce:
1 clove of Garlic, chopped 
1 dries chili pepper, chopped
1 tsp. oregano
2 cans of peeled tomatoes
1 tbsp. balsamic vinegar
a hand of fresh basil, chopped