The nice people at Gourmet Garden have sent me some lovely Herbs and Spices to try, with this in mind I adapted one of our favourite family recipes – Spiced Pork and Lemon Pasta – to make full use of the Chilli and Parsley.
Ingredients
1 bag of sausage meat (or 8 sausage with their skins removed)
500g pasta (any shape)
150ml chicken stock (1 OXO chicken cube)
Grated zest of 1 lemon
Juice of 2 lemons (juice of 1 if you don’t like it too strong)
1 tbsp Gourmet Garden chilli
2 tbsp Gourmet Garden parsley
50g grated cheddar cheese
¾ tub of Philadelphia – the 300ml tub (or cheaper equivalent cream cheese)
Salt and pepper to season
If you’re using a bag of sausage meat, it should split into about 30 meatballs or more if you make them quite small. Sausages can be split into five meatball shapes so that’ll give 40 meatballs.
- Put the meatballs in a large wok. You’ll need to be a bit of a space planner to fit them all in, but it doesn’t matter if they’re touching slightly as when they cook, they’ll shrink slightly. You can use a large frying pan but it needs to be large enough to get the pasta in as well ideally.
Put the pasta on to boil
Brown off the meatballs on a fairly high temperature and add the chicken stock (slowly in case it splutters everywhere), chilli, parsley, zest and juice of lemon and the Philadelphia.
- You’ll need to carefully mix in the Philadelphia as it needs time to incorporate with the stock etc. This should take a couple of minutes.
Once it looks like a creamy sauce, reduce the heat and leave to gently simmer until the pasta is cooked.
Drain the cooked pasta and tip into the sauce and meatball mix. Turn off the heat and add the grated cheese. Stir together and it’s ready to serve!
This is an adapted recipe (this is the original) based on trying to buy cheaper ingredients. Generally, this mix should cost you less than £5 to make as if you choose the supermarket own brand of cream cheese and sausages, you save a small fortune. You can obviously use Fresh Chilli and Parsley, but that might bump up the cost a little over time as the Gourmet Garden tubes last for 90 days. So you can make this several times with the same tube within a three month period.
