Last night I made dinner and got to try our Parpardelle’s pasta that we bought at the farmer’s market last weekend.  We cooked up some of the sweet red onion linguine and paired it with some roasted vegetables and cilantro pesto.  This is not exactly a seasonal recipe right now, but eggplant, summer squash, and cilantro were on sale at Sunflower Markets and I decided to try this.  When I was in Florida visiting my sister Amy a few weeks back, we bought some cilantro pesto from a booth there and I was really surprised by how good it was.  Last summer I made roasted vegetables on top of pasta many times, but usually just paired it with spaghetti sauce.  Last night I tried making some cilantro pesto myself instead of using spaghetti sauce this time.  The dish really turned out tasty, and we were pleasantly surprised by how good the sweet red onion linguine was as well.  I have to say, I couldn’t really taste the sweet red onion in the linguine, but it was great pasta none-the-less.

Roasted Veggies with Cilantro Pesto and Pasta

Roasted Vegetables

NOTE: You could substitute other vegetables as well, zucchini or bell peppers, for example, both work well in this recipe.

Heat oven to 420°F .  In a large casserole dish drizzle a tablespoon or two of olive oil.  Add cherry tomatoes, summer squash, onion, and garlic to the dish and salt and pepper to your liking.  Then add the eggplant – which will already taste salty – and drizzle all the ingredients with a little more olive oil and mix them around so they are coated.  Put casserole dish in the oven and bake for around 45 minutes or until vegetables are cooked through and slightly browning.

Put cilantro, pinenuts, parmesan cheese, and garlic into a food processor and blend adding the olive oil a little at a time.

To serve over the vegetables and pasta, I added a couple of tablespoons or so of water to thin out the pesto and turn it into more of a sauce, then poured over both.

My friend Catherine requested that I post more recipes online and we made vegetarian lasagna for dinner Monday night. For some reason I always thought lasagna would be very hard to make, but it’s actually pretty easy. This recipe is pretty versatile too, I’ve been using spinach and onions as the two vegetables in this but I’ve also used braised winter squash, which makes it a little sweeter, and you could use pretty much anything else you wanted as well.

In the summer I like to make pasta sauce, but since we didn’t freeze any this year I’ve been buying Bertolli organic tomato sauce at SuperTarget, and it is delicious (if you read my last post, it also only has a few key ingredients all of which are real food). I’ve also been buying the whole wheat semolina Archer Farms brand lasagna noodles at SuperTarget, even though they are whole wheat they still have a really good flavor. I buy oven ready lasagna that doesn’t need to be precooked and can go straight in the oven.

Spinach Lasagna

Chop your onion in half and cut it into thin slices.  Heat up 3 tblsp of olive oil on medium heat, when the oil shimmers put the onion in the oil and cook for about 5 minutes until the onion turns light brown.  Set the onions aside for later.

While the onion is cooking, wash and chop your spinach.  I like the spinach chopped into very small pieces so it doesn’t get stringy in the lasagna.

In a large casserole dish, put down 2 tblsp of olive oil and 2 tblsp of tomato sauce and spread around.  Add one layer of lasagna noodles.  Pour a thin layer of pasta sauce on the noodles and even out with a spoon.  Put down about 1/3 of the spinach.  Next put down a layer of mozzeralla cubes and fill in the gaps with the ricotta cheese.

Create layers of noodles, sauce, spinach and cheese until you are out of noodles.  Top the last layer of noodles with sauce, cheese and the caramelized onions.

Cook in the oven for 30 minutes at 400 degrees.