[funky upbeat intro music]
Okay you lovely people,
We're gonna make a beautiful pasta dish.
We're gonna make Veggie Bolognese.
This is from my new cookbook, Super Food Family Classics.
We've taken one of the most classic family recipes, Spaghetti Bolognese, and we've made it Veggie.
It's really nutritious, it's perfectly balanced, it's 3 of your 5 fruit and veg a day, which is fantastic.
And it's bigging up wonderful ways to get your protein without eating meat, which is always really handy in modern day life.
So look, we got, 2 sticks of celery, 2 carrots, 2 onions, 2 cloves of garlic.
I'm using 20 grams of dried porcini here.
That's the only sort of ingredient you gotta find, really, but they're in the supermarket, and this gives you the body of flavour, right.
It's a really humble, delicious meal.
So, couple of tablespoons olive oil into a pan, put that on a medium heat.
Celery, nice and fine.
We're gonna slice up some garlic here, and 2 sprigs of rosemary, finely chopped.
2 carrots, half a centimetre dice.
This is a rustic, peasant dish, and it's gonna make you really, really happy.
I'm using red onions, you can use white if you want.
Finely chop it.
We've got that on a medium heat, and I'm gonna put a lid on.
I'll give that a little shake and just sort of slowly sweat that off, without colour, for about 15-20 minutes.
Before I kind of disappear, I'm just gonna cover the dried porcini.
It's very savoury.
It's got a real, deep, incredible broth.
So this has had about 20 minutes now.
And it's just frying away, nice and gently.
I can just turn the gas up a little bit.
100 mills of Chianti goes in there.
Let it cook away.
So while that's frying away, add couple of leaves of bay leaves.
They can go in now.
Let's just roughly chop these mushrooms.
These have rehydrated now.
It's only 20 grams, guys, but it's big flavour.
We're gonna go in with the broth now, guys.
We're ending the frying process now.
Often there's kind of little bits of grit - discard that.
You're gonna go in with the tomatoes.
Loosely bash those up, and they'll fall apart as they cook.
I'm just gonna put a swig of boiling water in each tin.
Just swill it around.
So, tomatoes are in.
Now, lentils, and they're brilliant.
They absorb flavour, just like meat would.
So, we're just gonna break up some of those tomatoes, and we're gonna turn the heat back down to sort of medium.
And I'm gonna let that just kind of simmer, and blip away, for about 30 minutes.
And then I'll show you what to do next.
So let's have a little taste.
This is your opportunity to add a little season.
And the heat's off now.
I can put a little parsley through this lovely ragout.
You could use basil if you wanted to.
You can mix it up, or lovely marjoram, or something like that.
In the pan next to it, I have some pasta.
80 grams per person.
I've traded up from white pasta, spaghetti, to whole wheat pasta.
3 times the amount of fibre in whole wheat products.
More B vitamins, so really, really good.
So what I'm gonna do, is steal a little bit of water.
I'm just adjusting the texture.
And I want it to be nice and loose, so it just catches the pasta in a beautiful way.
That pasta has had its sort of, 8 minutes now.
It's ready and raring to go.
So, drain your pasta, and just keep a little bit of that cooking water, okay.
And, I'll show you why in a minute.
So I'm just gonna do a couple of portions of this.
Look at that.
Just mix it up.
Parmesan, 15 grams or so.
The seasoning in the Parmesan just brings the lovely flavours together.
Now it's starting to get thick, now, right, and a bit claggy.
And that's not cool.
So we're gonna add some of that cooking water.
And that's gonna keep it nice, and loose, and gorgeous.
So let's plate this up.
And before all the Veggies start telling me off saying that Parmesan is not vegetarian,
this is actually a cheese called Bella Lodi which IS using a vegetarian rennet, and it's very similar to Parmesan.
So here we go.
The lovely Veggie Bolognese.
Get in there.
Mmm.
[fork scraping plate]
Really good.
Sort of slightly smokey from the rosemary, and from the porcini.
Sweet from the tomatoes and you got all the veg that's kind of just cooked into the lentils, the bea— that kind of ragouty sort of texture that we love.
Please give it a go.
Don't write it off until you've tried it.
If you want more inspiration then click the 'i' box up there.
Super healthy and super delicious.
And at the end of the day, that's what it's all about.
[funky upbeat outro music]