So I decided to do something different with my pasta. Making a tomato sauce is easy enough and I'm sure you've got plenty of recipes for that kind of thing. I fancied making something different like a white, cheesy (without cheese!) type of sauce. It came out pretty well so I thought I would share it on here.
Ingredients: 3-4 cups of fresh pumpkin, skinned and de-seeded. (The original recipe used butternut squash but as that is quite difficult to find here, I used pumpkin instead which can be bought almost anywhere, but you can get good quality white pumpkin at The Royal Project Shop.) 1 tablespoon of nutritional yeast. (This is quite hard to get in Chiang Mai, I've been told Rimping have it but I've never seen it there. You can buy it from Blue Diamond Restaurant in the old city or order it from Chiang Mai Bread.)
1/2 teaspoon of smoked paprika.
1/2 teaspoon of chilli powder. 1/2 teaspoon of onion powder. 1 teaspoon of sea salt.
3 gloves of garlic. 1 cup of water.
1/3 cup of raw cashew nuts.
Some wholewheat pasta or your preferred type of pasta. Steamed veggies of your choice.
Optional toppings:- pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds.
Method:
Use your rice cooker to steam your pumpkin or you can roast it in the oven, or cook it any way that you want until it is soft.
Place the pumpkin in your high speed blender with all the other ingredients and blend until it is a smooth, sauce like consistency like the picture below. You can add more water if the sauce is too thick.
Before blending:
After blending, the sauce should look like this:
Mix with the cooked pasta along with some steamed vegetables of your choice such as kale, brocoli, carrot, tomatoes etc. If you want to superfood up you can add some seeds such as the pumpkin seeds which you removed earlier and sesame seeds.
The original recipe is here: http://ohsheglows.com/2013/10/21/smoky-butternut-squash-sauce-with-pasta-and-greens/
