Kale Bolognese

Cook kale. Drain liquid from kale to use in cooking pasta. Mix kale and tomato pasta sauce. Use leftover liquid and pasta for minestrone.

Easy Minestrone

This is the easiest minestrone dish I have ever seen or made. It involves boiling celery, onion, canned tomatoes and diced carrots in stock, then adding easy mac, waiting for that to cook, and finally adding baked beans. This is served with a side of slim noodles fried with leftover onion. This meal great value for calories and delicious.

Chicken yakitori

As per my habit of making meals with balanced portions of protein, carbs and vegetables, I have managed to create a meal that combines some of the most delicious foods you can think of: Yakitori chicken, macaroni cheese and pumpkin. The most complicated part was letting the chicken marinate for 24 hours before frying it up in a pan. The rest merely involved preparing a pack of easy mac and boiling pumpkin. Cause I'm fancy like that. And there's nothing more Japanese than making a traditional Japanese in an American way.

The chicken yakitori was of course, amazing. I will never want to eat non-marinated chicken breast again.

Chicken, pineapple and tomato pasta salad

One day when I returned home from holidays with my folks, I found the fridge full of fresh produce: pineapple, tomato and celery. My boyfriend had decided to make one of his mother's recipes for me. It's pretty straightforward: you just cook the chicken somehow (I microwaved it) and then make sure all the ingredients are tossed together in similar sized cubes with some dressing (I used French). My one regret was the chicken was so bland. While the tomato and pineapple give the meal a sweet and sour theme to it, using boiled chicken breast simply gives the sensation of there being extra, more textured, pasta. Thefore, if I ever make this again or ever need to use up fresh pineapple, I will use ham instead to make it a "Hawaiian" style pasta salad.

Salmon salmon linguine bolognese

Pasta doesn't get any more salmon themed than this. The arrabatia (capsicum flavoured) sauce has salmon added to it and the pasta itself is a salmon flavoured one made by a boutique brand. Perhaps making it all salmon and tomato wasn't the best idea, though, because it all tasted the same (except for the slight kick provided by the capsicum). It's difficult to know what to do, though, when the pasta is salmon flavoured. Perhaps alfredo sauce?

Healthy smoked salmon and kale linguine alfredo

I was in the unusual situation of having kale, smoked salmon and eggs to used up. I therefore did a search on Google for recipes with salmon, kale and eggs and came up with a version of alfredo that uses a raw egg sauce instead of cream. There is also this idea that you can substitute half the amount of pasta you would usually eat with a vegetable, in this case, kale. Kale is bitter and tough, so rubbing it with salt and and cooking it as much as possible are good ways of making it more palatable. Therefore, what I did was cook the kale and pasta together and drain, and while they were still hot, quickly added a mixture of beaten egg and skim milk. In true student fashion, I had also used some of the cheese powder that comes in sachets with those packets of Easy Mac (it was dissolved into the milk). You could of course use a little normal cheese like a normal person. Despite this, I think I can grandly state that I have made "healthy smoked salmon and kale linguine alfredo." The smoked salmon was untouched because I prefer it that way. Even so, it began to cook on top of the pasta as I was eating it.

Lentil gnocchi bolognese

This occurred somewhat accidentally. I needed to make bolognese for my boyfriend and I didn't have meat or normal pasta. The next best things? Gnocchi and lentils.

This dish is amazingly filling and healthy. It was also incredibly easy, as all I did was plop everything onto a baking tray and put it in the oven for about 40 minutes.