25 Nov Simple, seasonal: Roasted squash and caramelised leek pasta

Autumnal home cooking

We generally eat pasta about twice a week. Despite my writing mostly about Slavic, East European foods, it’s actually pasta that we eat most often. Of course, the Slavs have their own types of pasta, noodles and dumplings, but my pasta isn’t always Slavic. While I love łazanki and kluski as much as the next Pole, when I make pasta I’m not thinking about what genre my pasta fits into. I’m thinking about how to use up what I have from my weekly veg box, what’s most nutritious, quick to make and will go down well with the kids. This is seasonal home cooking and it doesn’t fit neatly into any category. It’s actually a category by itself in my book, perhaps an underrated one, since this is what we eat most of the time.

Seasonal pasta

Right now, we have a lot of squash and leek, so I made up this Autumnal pasta dish, which worked out beautifully. My partner immediately said that it was a new favourite pasta and that I should make it more often. While I don’t usually share pasta recipes on my blog, because they seem so everyday and pedestrian, I think it’s worth sharing a good one from time to time. If we are cooking seasonally, then we need more quick, easy ways to use up all those ingredients we are getting in our veg boxes. This pasta recipe might just inspire someone to do a squash pasta with their own twists and replacements. The great thing about this kind of pasta is that you can do anything you want with the recipe, there is no “authentic” and “inauthentic”, no rules apart from using what you have and making it taste good.

A recipe for roasted squash and caramelised leek pasta