Pumpkin Soup

This delicious and easy to prepare pumpkin soup recipe is a dieter's dream. Pumpkins are a vegetable that are very low in calories, contain no saturated fats or cholesterol, are a rich source of dietary fiber, anti-oxidants, minerals and vitamins. 

This recipe serves: 12 

Ingredients :

• 2kg pumpkin (use the dark green skin pumpkin, easy to cut)
• 2 large onions sliced or diced
• 4 slices short cut bacon, fat removed, chopped (bacon is optional, you may remove it from the list)
• 2 potatoes peeled and cubed.
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 1 teaspoon ground cumin (cumino)
• 1 litre beef stock or 4 cubes powdered with 1 litre water

Sardines Greek Salad

Sardines are also known as pilchards. They're really good, inexpensive, sustainable and full of healthy omega-3 fatty acids. Sardines sometimes get overlooked because of all their little bones, but when you cook them whole, you can strip out all the bones in one piece.  

Look for sardines that are clean-smelling and whole. Try to avoid bruised fish, and definitely avoid any fish with "belly burn," a condition where the belly is broken and the guts are starting to come out. This is a sign of an old fish, suitable only for salting down. Another thing, sardines do not freeze well. The oils in them turn rancid even in a freezer, and the flesh becomes a mushy mess when thawed. My advice: Never freeze fresh sardines.

For this Greek Salad, use sardines with skin and bones (which are edible) as they have more than four times the amount of calcium as skinless, boneless sardines.  

Ingredients :

Salad :

3 tablespoons lemon juice
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 clove garlic, minced
2 teaspoons dried oregano
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
3 medium tomatoes, cut into large chunks
1 large cucumber, cut into large chunks
125ml can chickpeas, rinsed
1/3 cup crumbled feta cheese
1/4 cup thinly sliced red onion
2 tablespoons sliced olives
 

Pairing Pasta with Perfect Sauce

You may not think about it every time you open a box of pasta, but the shape you choose plays an important role in the outcome of the dish. The right shape can make a good sauce great; the wrong shape can dampen the appeal of even the best sauce.

Long or short, smooth or ridged, thick or thin, with or without curves and crevices, different shapes of pasta capture and absorb sauce differently. Matched correctly—rigatoni with a hearty sausage sauce—and you have a hit, a pleasing interplay between the texture of the pasta and the components of the sauce. In this case, the pieces of sausage are captured in the hollow of the pasta. Matched less well—the same meat sauce paired with capellini (angel hair pasta)—and you get the vague sense that something is wrong. I say vague, because this kind of mistake is not always apparent; the food may look good and smell good, but it just doesn't come together well. In the case of the capellini, the delicate noodles can't support the meat sauce, which gets left behind in the bowl as the pasta gets eaten.