Baked Pasta with Kale and Butternut Squash

I wrote a really long post but my phone battery died. The re-do is going to be short and to the point.

I made this meal. People liked it.  I used sour cream and a scoop of Philadelphia cream cheese in place of the creme fraiche. I used Parmesan instead of Gruyere. The website "cooking light' might be a misnomer because I don't reckon this was a light meal, it included, bacon, cheese, fried onions, flour and a lot of pasta. It was, however, pretty darned tasty. (Edit: Cooking light thinks that this meal serves 8. In our house it served four! oops!).

When I'm busy, I like baked pasta dishes because I can stick them in the oven while I have spare time between getting home from work and going to get my son from whichever club/activity he's doing that day. Then, when the boy comes home, all the hard work is done and we have a hearty, home-cooked meal waiting for us.

Here are the pictures.

Chicken Fried Rice and Sweet Chili Vegetables

I made this meal because I wanted to use up some left over white rice from the chili I made on the weekend. I know that white rice is not especially healthy at the best of times, and is made even less healthy when fried, but I really don't like throwing away good food. I found an excellent recipe for fried rice, I followed it pretty exactly, but used more vegetables. I included one onion, two carrots, two cups of peas, five spring onions, and half a bag of beansprouts, and chicken for protein.

I served the rice with some stir fried vegetables that I made in a sweet chili sauce. I decided to make this sauce on the fly. In the supermarket I saw some sweet chili sauce and read the ingredients on the side. They were all things that I have in my house already: red chilis, rice vinegar, sugar, water, garlic, ginger, cornflour. I decided to skip the store-made sauce and make my own. When I got home, I googled this recipe and was pretty amazed and the quantity of sugar that this meal requested. A whole cup of sugar! I couldn't possibly serve that much sugar on the vegetables that I was serving with fried rice!  I cut the sugar by about half, and the meal tasted fine! Jesus wept people, chill out on the sugar! I poured he sauce over 3 sliced courgettes (two green, one yellow), one red pepper, a punnet of mushrooms, 5 spring onions, sugar snap peas and the left over beansprouts. It might have contained our five a day, but it also contained an absurd amount of sugar.