Freshers Foodie Tip #10 - Cut out the MEAT!

You may be a carnivore BUT meat is expensive, even if you buy the cheap and nasty veiny stuff – yuck!!! A veggie curry is just as nice as a chicken one, and is more authentic!

There are plenty of recipes on this site that you might want to try: 

• Lumaconi Alla Vodka
• Stuffed Butternut Squash with Cheese Muffins
• Garden Curry
• Spinach Lasagna Rolls
• Rice and Lentil Pilaf
• Spaghetti Puttanemma
• Lentil Lasagna
• Nepalese Curried Vegetables with Lentils
• Butternut Squash with Pine nut and Sage
• Veggie Tagine with Cous cous
• Veggie Stir Fry

You may not think a recipe missing meat will be nice, or fill you up, BUT you’d be COMPLETELY wrong.

Of course you can treat yourself every now and then! But don’t just live off cheap and nasty chicken. Get your protein from much cheaper sources - for example pulses!

Meatless Monday is huge in America, and is a brilliant place to start! Bring the next big food trend to your halls!

Lumaconi alla Vodka

The idea of adding Vodka to a tomato and bacon based pasta sauce did not seem strange to me today when I decided to give it a try, but after searching into the history of the dish, I struggled to find where the idea originated from.


Even Wikipedia was no help, giving numerous possibilities of how the dish developed:
According to Pasquale Bruno, Jr., author of The Ultimate Pasta Cookbook, penne alla vodka was invented at Dante, a restaurant in Italy. Other historians of the culinary arts recognize James Doty, a graduate of Columbia University, as the inventor of penne a la vodka. Paula Franzese, an American law professor, has asserted that her father Luigi Franzese, born in Naples, Italy in 1931, devised the first version of penne alla vodka, which he called penne alla Russia because of the addition of the vodka to his tomato and cream sauce base. He first prepared the dish table side for patrons at the New York City restaurant Orsini in the early 1970s. (This seems the more recognised version of events with other websites I stumbled across stating the same!) The Williams Sonoma Essentials of Italian cookbook says that it was invented in the 1980s by a Roman chef for a vodka company that wanted to popularize its product in Italy.

Wherever the dish originated from, this is my version! Do give it a try and let me know what you think!