Cheesy Peasy Pasta Bake

Sometime towards the end of last year, my friend Chris gave us a homegrown, blue pumpkin. I’m amazed to find that I don’t have a photo of it, but it was large, a fairly traditional pumpkin shape, and rather spiffingly blue. It sat on the dining room table for months, waiting for me to pluck up the courage to do something with it, which eventually happened last week.

One of the first things I did in the garden last year, when we were still waiting for the hard landscaping to be finished, was to put some large, colourful planters into the front garden. To begin with they were planted with sweet peppers (actually cool chillies), but in the autumn I replanted them with their permanent contents, and they have become my container herb garden. Although they’re at the front of the house they are one of the easiest place to get to from the kitchen for a quick snip, and the paving means I can get there in my slippers…. This means I can, and do, just pop out to get a handful of fresh herbs, and we are starting to add more of them to our cooking.

One of the great challenges, during our summer of waiting to move, has been feeding ourselves. We packed away a lot of the ‘unnecessary’ cooking equipment for a few weeks, only to find it was out of action for a few months. With numerous false starts, I kept running down the cupboards and the freezer, in anticipation of a move date that never came. Stress levels rose, cooking mojo vanished and we ate far more oven chips than you can imagine.

This is one of a series of posts looking at what we might eat on Mars, where most food would have to be shelf-stable, tinned or freeze-dried. You can find other posts on this topic under the Martian Meals tag.

NASA has announced grants or cooperative agreements for seven exciting new space biology investigations to advance our understanding of how plants respond, acclimate and adapt to the space environment, in support of human space exploration.

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Do you know about the Amazing Baking Soda Uses for Growing Vegetables? It is beneficial in producing a sweeter harvest, protecting them from unwanted pests, and much more!

After salad crop failures in Spain and shortages of courgettes, broccoli and other ‘long distance’ vegetables gardeners could to worse than focus on traditional and non-traditional root crops.

If you’re well-versed in TikTok food trends—cottage cheese, rat snacks, or boozy pineapple spears, anyone?—you may already know about the recent sushi-related food trend that influencers are trying their hand at: the sushi bake. This riff on the super popular Japanese dish is quick and easy to prepare, making the flavors of sushi much more accessible from home.

Salad:

IT’S SO EASY, and also good for you—so good you could eat one for breakfast, and nobody would even raise an eyebrow, at least not in my household. And ‘tis their season, so I’ve been baking pears. I feel silly even telling you how to do this.

When Alexandra Stafford, author of the book “Bread Toast Crumbs” and creator of the website alexandracooks.com, has visited the podcast before in recent years, we’ve usually talked vegetable cookery or soups, because we’re both big soup-makers. But 2020 is no normal year. And so what the hell? Let’s bake.Plus: Comment in the box at the bottom of the page for a chance to win one of the books we’re featuring—all five will be given away here to five readers. Then head over to Ali’s website for a chance to win each book, too (details below).Read along as you listen to the November 30, 2020 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on Apple Podcasts (iTunes) or Spotify or Stitcher