Recipe of the Month – March

Pasta Bake

Ingredients:
2 handfuls pasta – any kind
Vegetables: quantity to suit your appetite – cooked leftovers,
or fresh or frozen
Meat: any kind of cooked meat – sausages, ham, chicken,
turkey and so on
Small tin chopped tomatoes (or a small jar of Bolognese sauce if you
like things to be seasoned and extra tomatoey)
2 handfuls grated cheese
Handful breadcrumbs (optional)
Ovenproof ceramic dish or casserole dish.

Method
1. Preheat oven to 160°C/140°C fan/Gas 3
2. Bring a pan of water to the boil and put in the pasta and any fresh,
prepared vegetables and simmer for 10 mins. At this point, if you have
frozen vegetables, add them now and simmer until they are tender.
3. Strain the water from the pasta and vegetables and place them back
in the saucepan, adding the tomatoes and/or Bolognese sauce and the
cooked meat.
4. Stir together and add to your dish, sprinkling the grated cheese and
the optional breadcrumbs over the top.
5. Bake for about 40 minutes, until the cheese is bubbling and beginning
to turn brown.

Cooking for One – a collection of recipes and stories written by the bereaved offering wisdom, insight, love and hope.

Cooking for One contains no platitudes about what a great healer time can be, it is a candid account of the raw pain and utter loneliness that grief can bring about. Those who have opened up about their grief have told it as it really is, not what they think people want to hear. They tell you what has helped and the lessons that they have learned along the way.

So, as well as containing delicious recipes, Cooking for One aims to serve as a personal handbook designed to help the bereaved navigate their personal pathway of grief. Despite people telling them that they ‘really ought to be getting over the worst of it by now’ – and however much they appear to be outwardly coping – perhaps the pain will never fully fade and nor would they wish it to.

Tracey’s Story

After I was bereaved, I quickly discovered that life goes on – that I still had to go to the shops to get food, to the pharmacy to collect the prescription, to the post office to post a parcel that had been waiting to be returned since before mum died. Some days I was a mess and looked terrible, with unwashed hair, red eyes, and blotchy cheeks – my mind preoccupied with bereavement or jobs relating to it that still had to be done.

I know it’s pushing it to call what follows a recipe, but I often make this as it’s great for using up any leftover bits of cooked meat and veg. I shared it because there’s no weighing involved and it’s totally flexible as to what you can add. It’s quite easy for someone who is grieving and perhaps isn’t used to cooking.

All the ingredients are flexible in terms of both the volume and the type you use, except the pasta, I suppose, because if you don’t add any pasta, then it isn’t really a pasta bake!

For information on Rosedale’s bereavement support group, please click here.