Adventures with my food processor (Part One of an occasional series)

Luke and I love making food but as all of you who work full-time probably agree, time-consuming and exciting cooking isn't always what you feel like doing when you get home after a busy day. Recently we felt like we'd been getting into a bit of a rut with our evening meal, making the same things week after week and not particularly caring about our food. We decided to have a whole week of making completely new dishes that we'd never cooked at home before. It was great. But on one night that week, we were going out and had to make something which would be ready quickly.

Pasta with some sort of sauce and vegetables. Gnocchi with some sort of sauce and vegetables. Everybody eats it, right? It's quick, it's easy and you don't have to slave over a hot stove for two hours in order to produce it. Since we've been training for the Great Eastern Run we've become quite conscious about what we put in our mouths and cooking most of our meals from scratch has become a priority for us. A while back we decided to stop buying sauces in jars, when we could - seeing as we recently acquired a food processor we thought we'd better crack on with using it. And I decided to make a vegetable-filled, delicious sauce from scratch.

What I used to serve two people:
200g sunstream tomatoes on the vine
One red pepper
One yellow pepper
One red onion
Three fat cloves of garlic
One medium-sized red chilli
Olive oil
A handful of fresh basil leaves
Sea salt and pepper

1. Roughly chop all ingredients except basil and place in a baking tray.

2. Season well with salt and pepper, drizzle with olive oil and roast at Gas Mark 6/200C/400F for half an hour.

3. Pour the entire contents of the tray into food processor, add basil leaves and whiz until mixture is as smooth or as chunky as you like.

4. Serve over pasta (normal or stuffed), gnocchi etc. There's mine with some gnocchi, mixed leaves and freshly-grated parmesan.




Really simple, full of goodness and tastes delicious - the chilli gives it a nice kick.