I call it ‘lazy’ because I couldn’t be bothered to dice and chop everything, so I pureed some of it! Namely, the onions and garlic. It ended up even better because the mixture coated the other veggies when I sauteed them, and they became even more flavourful!
My dear client gave me an abundance of farm-grown kale so I had to do something with it! Among the many recipes I am planning to try, I decided to make some pasta sauce because we had so much veggies at home AND I had a meat binge last night for my friend’s birthday dinner at an all you can eat Brazilian Steakhouse!
I am guestimating some of the amounts because I really just eyeballed everything. After a while of measuring and weighing with my meal preps, I’ve become pretty comfortable with just eyeballing most things.
Feel free to play around with the portions but here is what I used tonight:
- 1lb of cherry tomatos (Roma tomatos are usually the popular picks but this is what I had in the fridge)
- 3 chopped zucchinis
- 3 peeled carrots
- 3 celery stocks
- 2 heaping handfuls of chopped kale (and when I say chopped, I mean I used a pair of kitchen scissors and snipped away – LAZY!)
- 1 cup of sliced mushrooms
- 1.5 small red onions, cut into quarters
- 5 cloves of garlic
- 2 tsp of Bragg apple cider vinegar
- black pepper
- pink sea salt
- 2 bay leaves
- 2 tbsp oil (olive, grapeseed, coconut, avocado are my picks)
- eyeball some sage, thyme, parsley, chilli flakes
- 1 cup water
- 1 package of carb free, 25 calorie pack of NuPasta (made from soy) for me
- a ridiculous amount of red lentil pasta for the hubby (life isn’t fair. Just kidding. This pasta is amazing, packed with protein and free of chemicals and GMO, but I wanted to keep my dinner light and carb free…because – I still feel gross from last night haha)
What to do:
Tomato Sauce
- Boil the cherry tomatos for 10 minutes (these guys don’t boil or peel as nicely as roma tomatos)
- run them through cold water and peel off the skin. Again, I was lazy so I peeled about 1/3 of them then I just said forget it, and chucked them into my Nutribullet and blended!
- set aside
Vegetables
- place the onions and garlic into Nutribullet and blend for a few seconds. I didn’t want them to be complete mush
- heat oil in a pot and dump the onion/garlic puree in. Saute for 5 minutes. In the meantime, start prepping the other vegetables. Next time I may try blending the carrots, celery and mushrooms with a less intense blade with my Nutribullet so they end up finely diced – that’s if I am super lazy
- added the celery, carrots, zucchini and mushrooms, continued to saute
- added the bay leaves and other herbs and spices and some apple cider vinegar
- covered the lid and turned heat to medium for 6-7 minutes
Pasta
- prepare as per package instructions in a separate pot
Finale
- pour the tomato mixture into the pot of vegetables, added water, mixed, turned heat back up to high to boil
- added heaping handfuls of kale
- turned heat down to slightly below medium and simmered for 10 minutes (or longer if you want veggies to be softer, especially the kale)
- poured over my Nupasta and put it in my belly!
Let me know how it goes! Please like and share!
