Warm couscous salad

Hi to yous all!

Tonight, Spaghetti Lovers are going to 

present you with a recipe for a delicious warm couscous salad.

To prepare this yummer

(I´ve actually just made that word up...it´s supposed to be a noun from “yummy”),

you´re going to need:

-A reasonable amount of couscous

-Broccoli florets (frozen of fresh, I´d say a small cup per portion)

-Peas (frozen, fresh or canned, half a cup per portion)

-Corn (frozen or canned, half a cup per portion

-Pepper (yellow or green, to keep the colours classy, cut in stripes)

-Cheddar – diced

-Olive oil

-Salt, black pepper, dried basil, dried oregano

This salad is super easy, super yummy and super versatile

as it can be served on its own as a main dish

as well as with something else as a side.

First, you need to cook the couscous. 

Just put it in a pot, add boiling water and stir well, 

leave until the couscous soaks all the water.

Then cook the vegetables 

– just so that they are nice and crispy –

and strain them. 

Mix the couscous with the vegetables

and add a bit of olive oil, salt, pepper and herbs.

Now only a bit of cheese on top and here we go

 

Enjoy!

Creamy cauliflower curry with cheesy couscous

Hellos!

Here we come with another exciting recipe!

This one was actually invented by a complete accident 

when we once happened to have not much food left 

and wanted to cook something slightly different than what we usually cook.

For this easy cauliflower curry, you´re going to need:

-Cauliflower 

(amount depends on how many portions your making.

Since it´s basically the main ingredient,

I´d say a bowl of cauliflower florets per portion should be ok)

– either fresh or frozen, depends on what´s available

-Philadelphia light

(now, you can use any kind of cream cheese you want. 

We use Philadelphia light as it´s really nice, creamy and mild.

If I remember correctly, we used about 3 spoonfuls)

-Curry powder – medium, hot or combination of those

-Couscous

-Grated cheddar

(this keeps reoccurring on here...hmmmmmmmm. 

Wonder if we should maybe rename the blog

and called it “cheese lovers”?:))

-Salt, black pepper, coriander

First, cook the cauliflower until it´s nice and soft but still a wee bit crunchy.

Once it´s cooked, place it into a saucepan, add the cream cheese and mix it all together. 

Then add curry (as much as you want or can bear:)) 

and a bit of salt and pepper and leave it all to cook 

for a bit so that the flavours merge nicely.

Then prepare the couscous. 

Place dry couscous into a pot, add boiling water and stir it well. 

Leave until the couscous soaks in all the water and gets soft.

Then add a bit of salt and some coriander

(I don´t know why but I think coriander and curry go well together...). 

Finally, add some grated cheddar and mix it all together until the cheese melts.

Here we go, almost there!

Place into plates and enjoy :)

This is what we do when we want to be super-healthy!

Today´s recipe is the easiest one so far to do since

you don´t actually need to cook anything

and it´s perfect farm nice and warm spring days.

It´s basically just a mixed vegetables salad (2 portions):

Iceberg lettuce 

(Alisson´s not a fan of lettuce so this is optional :))

2 tomatoes

1 pepper (any colour)

Black and green olives

Cheddar

Fresh basil leaves

Salt, black pepper, Italian herb mix

Olive oil

Balsamic vinegar

(again, vinegar-haters leave this out)

It´s easy peasy. Cut the vegetables and the cheese 

(it´s nice to try different “patterns” as it makes the whole thing look better – tomatoes – dices, pepper – stripes, olives – little slices, cheddar – grated or diced)

and place them into the plates.

Add a bit of salt, black pepper and herbs on top, then a bit of olive oil 

(and vinegar for those who like it)

and a few chopped leaves of fresh basil.

We usually eat this delicious salad with toasted bread with cream cheese 

(Philadelphia light being our favourite).

Super quick, super tasty, super healthy!

SPAGHETTI (OH YES WE LOVE SPAGHETTI) WITH CHEESE SAUCE AND SPINACH

On Sunday afternoon, we, once again, had some cravings for cheese.

I don´t know if it happens to you as well but it happens to us all the time.

We DO eat an extraordinary amount of cheese but oh well,

it´s only because cheddar´s just too good to resist :)...

so we decided to cook super cheesy spaghetti with some more cheese on top 

(Hello, cheese lovers!)

Anyway, down to the recipe.

You´re going to need:

Spaghetti

Spinach – frozen, fresh...whatever

Cheese sauce – now you can either make your own one

(that is a wee bit time consuming and, to be honest, I don´t think we´ve tried...)

or buy one in ASDA, Tesco...

Our favourite one is ASDA´s 4 cheese sauce 

(at least I think it´s called 4 cheese sauce :)) 

or ASDA´s ricotta sauce with spinach

(if you´re using that one, you don´t need to add any more spinach...

unless you´re crazy about it or wanna become Popeye :))

Grated cheddar (loads of it, as per usual)

Salt, pepper, chilli flakes, garlic powder, possibly dried herbs (basil, oregano, thyme...)

Fresh basil

Olive oil

Another super simple recipe.

Cook the spaghetti until they´re “al dente”. 

In the meantime, chop a few leaves of fresh basil and prepare the spinach. 

Just cook it (make sure it stays nice and crunchy),then strain it and season it.

I, for some reason, really like spinach in combination with garlic

so I usually add a bit of salt and pepper and a reasonable amount of garlic powder 

(Chouchou never complained so I guess it is quite tasty :) {Chouchou loves garlic!!!}).

Heat up the cheese sauce (either in the microwave or in a pot).

Once your spaghetti are cooked, strain them and put them back into the pot.

Add the sauce and a bit of seasoning 

(chilli flakes that I love to put into almost everything as I´m crazy about food that´s got a wee bit of a spicy kick, pepper, you can add some sort of Italian dried herb mixture

if you wish as well, it´s not going to do any harm :))

and stir it all well. Place into plates and put some “garlicy” spinach on top. 

Then a fair bit of grated cheddar, chopped fresh basil and a spray of olive oil and voila, here we go!

(You can add olives as well, if you have some left in your fridge. 

Olives can only make things better!)

(: Enjoy :)

Mexican Nacho Burgers with Curry and Cheddar Couscous and Green Vegetables

 

Hellos to all of you out there!

Tonight, Spaghetti Lovers are going to present you with another delicious, cheap and easy-to-cook recipe. This time it´ll be an amazing mixture of couscous and vegetables accompanied with ASDA´s Mexican nacho burgers (truly amazing stuff, definitely worth trying. We´re in love with them!).

You´re going to need:

Couscous (amount, once again, depends on how many portions you´re planning to make)

Grated cheddar (we say – loads!)

Mexican Nacho Burgers (veggie)

Frozen vegetables – peas, corn, broccoli, spinach (we used frozen chopped spinach, I can imagine, though, that fresh would work even better)

Salt and pepper

Curry powder

Olive oil

The first thing you need to do is to put the burgers into a preheated oven

(in accordance what´s written on the package – should be around 20mins, 200 degrees). 

Make sure you turn them after 10mins to get them evenly baked and crispy all around.

Boil enough water in a pot 

(or use a kettle...lazy!:)) 

and place your frozen veggies into the boiling water. 

Add a bit of salt and cook the vegetables until they are soft 

(not too soft, it´s better to have them nice and fresh and crispy than gooey and mashed...). 

Once they´re ready (takes about 8mins), strain them and season them with a bit of pepper. 

Now, we´re quite a bit into olive oil so we usually add about a spoonful to the vegetables to give it a nice Mediterranean hint.

It works really well with butter instead of olive oil as well. 

Yummy.

Then, place a reasonable amount of couscous in a smaller pot

(we´re quite bad at measuring stuff...we pretty much always just estimate and usually eat everything we cook because what´s the point of keeping it for later, right?:)), 

add a bit of boiling water and stir it. 

Again, never know exactly how much so we usually just add a bit, let the couscous soak and then, 

if it looks like the couscous is still going to be too hard, 

add a bit more water and let it soak again. 

Repeat until the couscous is nice and soft. 

Add a bit of salt and looooooads of curry

(if you´re as crazy about curry as we are!)

and stir it all well.

To make the couscous a bit creamy, 

add two spoonfuls of grated cheddar and stir it in. 

Place everything on a plate 

(careful while taking the burgers out of the oven!) 

and put some more cheddar on the vegetables

(they must be still warm, though, otherwise it doesn´t work 100%).

You can, of course, add a dip or sauce according to what you like

(my personal favourite is chilli relish) to go with the burgers.

Bon appétit!

GREENISH SPAGHETTI

Let´s have a look at what we had for lunch today. It´s simple, it´s easy, it´s cheap and it´s super yummy.

I´d call it “Greenish Spaghetti“...because it´s kinda greenish... :)

what are you going to need to prepare this tasty meal?

Spaghetti (amount depending on how many people are going to eat and how big is their appetite)

Half a glass of green pesto (I´d say it´s about 3 spoonfuls)

Black olives (chopped, I´d say 10 per portion but again, all depending on whether you´re a big olive fan or not...I´d say they can be easily replaced with, for example, sundried tomatoes or grilled peppers. The possibilities are endless!)

Mozzarella (ours was ASDA brand one,
we used one packet for the two of us.

I can imagine someone who´s not as crazy about cheese as we are could probably do with one for three to four portions though)

Chilli flakes

Olive oil

Salt, pepper

Fresh basil (chopped)

It´s easy peasy. 

Boil a reasonable amount of water in a pot

(yeah, we´re impatient and just boiled it in a kettle..muhehe!).

Add a bit of olive oil (one spoon should do) and salt. 

Then add the spaghetti and cook them until they´re “al dente”.

In the meantime, chop the olives, 5 leaves of basil and the mozzarella

and wait until your spaghetti are cooked

(this is the most annoying part. We usually spend the time waiting for our food to be cooked eating something that doesn’t need to be cooked, therefore, we usually end up being full before we even get down to eating our food..which doesn ´t stop us from eating the food anyway though :)).

Once the spaghetti are “al dente”, strain them and put them back into the pot. 

Add the pesto, a half of the basil and another spoon of olive oil 
(can´t do any harm:)).

Stir it all well and season it with a bit of chilli and ground black pepper.

Place into your plates, add chopped black olives, the rest of the basil and the mozzarella. 

Sprinkle with a bit of ground black pepper and voilá, here we go :)

Bon Appétit!

First hello from Spaghetti Lovers

We are students.  

Students tend to lack money every now and then...and so do we. Students tend to prefer spending money on parties, drinkies or “necessary” clothing and make-up items....and so do we. But we thought “hey, we might not be rich but we can still eat well (and healthy)!” and managed to develop quite fine cooking skills over the course of this academic year. And because we´re not greedy, we´ve decided to share our cheap, quick and easy (not more than 20mins needed for any of the main courses!) recipes with the world via this blog. 

We are probably going to try to post a couple of recipes every week (depends on how creative we are at the moment and on how much stuff there is in our fridge :)) until we run out of ideas and start repeating ourselves. Then we´ll probably just stop.

The aim of this blog is to show that one can eat well without having to spend a fortune on groceries or take-outs, without having a huge kitchen full of latest high-tech cooking equipment and dishes and without owning every cookbook ever published. Also, most of the recipes are going to be vegetarian, since one of us is a veggie and the other one has sort of assimilated :)

 

We usually shop in ASDA and our normal budget for 2 weeks is £25 per person, this includes breakfasts and snacks. An average cost of one meal is £2 for two people (yes, we do buy the ASDA brand stuff..But to be honest, there´s nothing wrong with it and most of it is fairly comparable to the more expensive items of the same sort). We buy similar stuff every time (pasta of all kinds, mostly spaghetti..surprisingly :), rice, couscous, frozen vegetables – who lives in student halls knows, that it is rather difficult to acquire enough space in a shared fridge to store fresh vegetables..and it´s also not exactly easy to estimate how much one needs, which often leads to a lot of vegetables going bad and therefore being wasted – this can be easily prevented by using frozen vegetables, pasta sauces (4 cheese being our all time favourite), cheddar...) and we sometimes spice things up with mozzarella, veggie burgers, fresh herbs and vegetables, olives etc.

Anyway, hope some of you that come across this blog are actually going to like it. We´ll try our best to keep it varied and interesting.

This should do for now. Thanks for reading!

CM