Kate & Kay's Pizza Pasta

Kate & Kay’s Pizza Pasta

Kate Allinson & Kay Featherstone

Featuring:

Peppers

Tomato

Effort:

Complexity:

Cost:

In season now

Serves: 6

Prep time: 15 mins

Cook time: 25 mins

Ingredients:

300g dried pasta

Low-calorie cooking spray

1 onion, peeled and diced

1 red pepper, deseeded and diced

1 yellow pepper, deseeded and diced

1 green pepper, deseeded and diced

2 garlic cloves, peeled and crushed

1 x 400g tin chopped tomatoes

1 x 500g carton passata

1 tsp dried oregano

2 tsp Worcestershire sauce (or Henderson's relish)

60g sliced pepperoni

7g fresh basil, chopped, plus a few extra leaves for garnish

Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

140g reduced-fat mozzarella

80g reduced-fat Cheddar

Veg Portions / Serving: 2

Recipes are from Pinch of Nom Quick & Easy by Kate Allinson and Kay Featherstone which is available to buy now

If you love pizza and pasta, why choose just one when you can have both? This pizza pasta is super quick and easy to make; the perfect no-fuss meal to feed the whole family. Combining the classic flavours of a pepperoni pizza stirred through pasta and baked in the oven with a golden bubbly cheese top. A great crowd pleaser!

Method:

Preheat the oven to 200°C (fan l80°C/gas mark 6).

Cook the pasta according to the packet instructions, drain and leave to one side.

While your pasta is cooking, spray a large frying pan with low calorie cooking spray and fry the onion over a medium heat for 3-4 minutes until translucent. Add the peppers and garlic and continue to fry until the peppers are soft. Pour in the chopped tomatoes, passata, oregano and Worcestershire sauce and stir until combined.

Dice 30g of the pepperoni and add to the sauce along with the chopped basil. Season the sauce with salt and pepper to taste.

Tip the cooked pasta into an ovenproof dish, pour over the sauce and stir until the pasta is coated. Sprinkle the pasta with the mozzarella and Cheddar and add the remaining sliced pepperoni to the top of the pasta.

Bake in the oven for 12-15 minutes until the cheese is golden and bubbling and the pasta heated through. Once the pasta is cooked, sprinkle with the fresh basil leaves and serve.

Engaging Kids

Kids who engage regularly with veg through veg-themed activities, such as arts and crafts, sensory experiences, growing and cooking are shown to be more likely to eat the veg they engage with. Encouraging kids to engage and play with veg is the handy first step to them developing a good relationship with veg and life-long healthy eating.

Kids in the kitchen

Kids can help with lots of the stirring, pouring and mixing here. Help them carefully add ingredients to the pan for the sauce, let them help you pour the sauce over the pasta and stir it all together. They can sprinkle in the pepperoni, basil and cheese.

Activities

While getting kids to interact with veggies for real and using their senses to explore them is best, encouraging hands off activities like arts & crafts, puzzles & games or at-home science experiments can be a great start, particularly for those who are fussier eaters or struggle with anything too sensory. Use these veg-themed activities as a stepping stone to interacting with the veg themselves. We have loads of crafty downloads here, puzzles here, and quirky science with veg here.

Sensory

Once you feel your child is ready to engage a little more, you can show them how to explore the veg you have on hand with their senses, coming up with playful silly descriptions of how a veg smells, feels, looks, sounds and perhaps even tastes. Find ideas, videos and some simple sensory education session ideas to get you started here.

Serving

The moments before food is offered can be a perfect opportunity for engagement that can help make it more likely a child will eat it! Giving children a sense of ownership in the meal can make a big difference to their feelings going into it and the pride they take in it. You know your child best, but if you aren’t sure where to start, we have some fun and simple ideas for easy roles you can give them in the serving process over here.

Kate Allinson & Kay Featherstone

Record-breaking bestselling authors Kate Allinson and Kay Featherstone are the creators of Pinch of Nom, a food blog with the aim of teaching people how to cook. Pinch of Nom is the UK's most visited food blog with an active and engaged online community of over 1.5 million followers. Their first book, Pinch of Nom, was the fastest-selling cookbook of all time. The pair once owned a restaurant together on the Wirral, where Kate was head chef, and today they continue to share healthy, slimming recipes on their huge online platform. Pinch of Nom Quick & Easy is their third cookbook.

pinchofnom.com/

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