This is a rather hungover post today on a Sunday morning, but I will be writing about my pasta bake I made last night.

I always find when I cook for friends it doesn’t exactly go to plan, I think it is the added pressure of all the eyes watching you. This dish was very tasty, however I am not that impressed with the recipe itself.

The ingredients I used were:
– Courgette
– Aubergine
– Tomato
– Onion
– Penne
– Garlic
– Fresh Basil

I doubled most of the ingredients as it said it only served two, and cooked nearly the whole bag of pasta. Depending on how hungry everyone is, this would serve around 4 people, with the opportunity of having seconds.

Roasting the onion, garlic, courgette and aubergine was very simple, I just added some oil and left it in the oven for around 20 mins. I then added the tomatoes. This is where the recipe slightly let me down. It says “200g tomato”, which I thought was quite hard to interpret. For someone who doesn’t eat tomatoes, and has never cooked them before I was quite unsure what this meant. 1 200g tomato? 200g worth of baby tomatoes? 200g of vine tomatoes? Do they need chopping? Do they go in whole? In the end I settled on halving 6 regular tomatoes and roasting them for around another 20 minutes. The recipe only said roast for another 10, but in my case they just weren’t cooking.

I must add, I did buy these tomatoes extra yesterday, costing me 50p from Aldi.

Sauce wise, the dish really needed some tinned tomatoes in my opinion. With only a few tablespoons of oil, and 4 spoons of the water from the pasta, it was relatively tasteless, and required a lot of seasoning. I think if tinned chopped tomatoes were added in the roasting tray, or even a shop bought tomato sauce, it would’ve really added to the dish.

Anyway, I thought it was quite nice, and I will certainly make it again- with a few changes. Cost wise, you’re looking about spending £3 or so on this, however it did feed 4 of us, and was simple to make. It also went perfectly with a side of garlic bread.

Here is the link to the recipe: https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/4520/roasted-ratatouille-pasta