Cooking pasta is easy!

Cooking pasta is easy, and there's little that can go wrong with it... here are some tips so that you enjoy every bite of your meal:

1. Fill a saucepan with water, and add a little salt to it (maybe 1tsp for every litre)

2. Bring the water to boil

3. Reduce the heat, so that the water is gently simmering

4. Gently introduce your Slyly Simple fresh pasta

5. Since all Slyly Simple pasta is made of whole wheat flour, let the pot simmer for around 5 minutes until the pasta is cooked, but is still firm to bite (cooked al dente).

6. Drain the pasta using a strainer, and toss it into a bowl with your favourite Slyly Simple sauce.

7. Toss well - garnish with cheese or basil or olives or sundried tomatoes or anything else that you prefer.

8. Eat hot!

Alternative:
Drain the pasta a little before it is full cooked, and introduce to a pan containing hot pasta sauce. Let the pasta cook fully in the sauce - this way it absorbs the flavours better.

Keep watching this space for oven and microwave suggestions!

Baked Ravioli

Making a batch of ravioli for a larger group of people can be time consuming - since the ravioli will need to be cooked in batches depending on the size of the saucepan. Besides, it is a challenge to keep the ravioli warm while you are cooking the rest of the batches, and you need to pester your guests to eat as soon as the ravioli is ready, lest it become cold and not quite as enjoyable. Ravioli also needs to be handled delicately, and you need to be really careful while tossing large quantities of it with a pasta sauce, so that none of them break apart. All together, serving ravioli to a larger group of people is a challenge, even when it is done the slyly simple way.

I've discovered the next best solution - bake it! You can cook all the ravioli in one go, leave it to cook in the oven as you can enjoy a conversation with your guests, and its much easier to keep it warm until its time to serve. You're far less likely to break the ravioli since they do not need to be handled as much - and even if a couple of pieces break, it still stays together without compromising on flavour or presentation. The texture of baked ravioli is not as soft as when they are boiled, so critics and connoiseurs may not approve - but I find this method to be very effective and tasty, particularly when you have a hungry lot hovering around the kitchen.

Here's how to go about it...

Step 1: Line a baking dish with a little bit of olive oil to make sure the pasta doesn't stick. Now spread out the ravioli in a single layer along the bottom of the dish.

Step 2: Cover the ravioli with your preferred pasta sauce - my favourite combination is with the cheesy tomato Slyly Simple sauce.

Step 3: Get creative - I used some asparagus in my dish. Perhaps you would like to try out some pieces of broccoli or mushrooms instead. You could even skip this step, it is going to taste great regardless.

Step 4: Add some cheese - I used grated cheddar here, but I imagine this would also be great with stronger flavours like goat cheese. You could skip this step too - although I'd say a bake looks incomplete without cheese :-)

If you like, you could repeat the steps above and make a second layer - my baking dish was wide enough so I stopped at one layer.

Step 5: Cover the dish with aluminium foil so that it bakes uniformly without burning the cheese. Pop into a pre-heated oven at about 100-120 degrees celcius, and bake for about 30-40 minutes. Baking time and temperature are rough estimates, its always safer to use a lower temperature and check on your dish after the first 20 minutes.

You could garnish the dish at the end with some fresh herbs or a dollop of butter if you like. Or if you can't wait anymore - just dig in!

Disclaimer: This dish is going to be a big hit, and you probably wont have enough. You may have some hungry faces at the dinner table even after this has been polished off.

Simple and sly - here's why

Wake up to an alarm, rush through your morning routine - walk the dog, get ready for work, drink some tea, shove in some breakfast, send the kids to school, instruct the maid... whatever it is that you need to do before you can finally step out. Its a big race to get out of the house on time, so you can spend the next one hour inching along in traffic, wishing you could have had an extra hour in bed instead. Work constitutes long hours in front of a computer, waiting endlessly for elevators, queues at the coffee machine, hurried lunches and dreaming about the weekend! Its finally time to take off in the evening, and you leave work full of plans of a fun evening - a movie perhaps, or visit the new restaurant, a nourishing dinner with the family, maybe invite some friends over. But then you have the arduous task of getting home, and plans change to slouching in front of the television, order in some pizza, serve the family some instant food, and socialize on Facebook instead. Nobody dreams of the mundane evenings we live every day, and yet, somehow, we are all stuck with the routine, Monday to Friday, waiting for the weekend of the mid-week holiday.
Traffic in Bangalore is out of control - and yes I know we all are part of the problem when we drive to work every day instead of using the public transport. Solving the traffic problem is another debate altogether, but we also need to look at what this does to our lives, our choices and our health. This is the very reason why Slyly Simple came into being - to make it possible to eat healthy, tasty and easily on a regular basis, in spite of all the problems that routine, traffic and pressure throw at you.

At the end of your day, the easiest thing to do is to grab a packet of instant noodles from the shelf. Now replace the noodles with a packet of fresh whole wheat pasta, and replace the taste maker with a dollop of fresh pasta sauce - the same effort results in a burst of flavour packed with health, freshness and nutrition. Its easy enough for anybody to make, and healthy enough to be eaten every day.
Experiment, add your own special touch - a dash of cream, some extra cheese, sauteed vegetables, meat, fish - with the basics in place your meal could only go from great to better. Its homemade, its gourmet, its exotic - bring a splash of flavour and fun to your mundane routine slyly and simply!

Green that's to be envied

I am largely vegetarian myself, and I simply couldn't live without a regular dose of milk and cheese. But I have noticed quite a few friends who are vegan have limited options when it comes to italian meals. Fresh pasta almost always has egg in it, and its really hard to come by a pasta dish without any cheese. Their only option is often the aglio olio - I incidentally quite like this but only with a generous sprinkling of parmesan on top! :-)

When I decided to try out vegan recipes for pastas and sauces, I was quite skeptical on how it would turn out. I was wondering if the pasta would have any texture - and if the sauces would taste like bland tomato juice. Well, here's the verdict:

The truth is, pasta without egg is hard to make. Its much harder to get a good dough, and requires a lot more kneading and a lot more physical effort. But it is possible to eventually have a good consistency which can be rolled into quite nice pasta. I added a splash of green by using some spinach - I thought it would be easier for me to avoid any mix ups while packaging or serving. I think it looks quite attractive, and even more exotic when served on a plate.

The vegan pasta sauce, on the other hand has a wonderful fresh tomato flavour to it, spiked with some chilli and herbs. It blends very well with the pasta, and I have had a few hard core meat eaters and cheese addicts declare that this is by far their favourite dish!

The zucchini and wasabi soup is vegan too - which may surprise you thanks to its creamy texture.

All in all, I am quite thrilled with the results - and vegan or not, I strongly recommend you try it!