Baked pasta with non-fat lentil and ajvar sauce

Preparation time-

20 mins

Cooking time-

30 mins

Quantity -

8 persons

Everyone oves crispy oven-baked pasta, and this juicy and very simple version will delight all your senses. The basic recipe is a non-fat Bolognese sauce of lentils and added real homemade ajvar. You can add to this sauce as you wish any kind of vegetable or cheese you have to hand. Whatever you add, it will taste great! Legumes and pasta are a classic combination of flavours in Mediterranean cuisine. Pasta prepared in this way, with some minor or major variations, makes a great meal any time of the year. Lentils cook quickly, and precooked beans can be stored in the freezer so they are on hand for just suchan occasion. As for your choice of pasta, there is so much to choose from that we won’t list all the possibilities here. The only important thing is for thepasta to be ribbed or hollow, so it can collect and retain this very thick sauce. In this recipe we use kidney beans, whose aroma comes especially to the fore when baked, along with baby spinach and full-fat white cheese, which provides the dish with a wonderful contrast both in taste and colour.

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Ingredients

500 g large hollow pasta (penne, rigatoni, tortiglioni)
1 yellow onion
1 red onion
2 cloves garlic
300 g fresh tomatoes

300 g peeled tomatoes or tomato pulp
200 g brown lentils
100 g cooked kidney beans
200 g baby spinach
2 heaped tbsp ajvar
100 g full-fat white cheese
1 tbsp oil
salt and pepper to taste

Instructions for preparing

Dice the yellow onion and fresh tomato. Heat the oil in a deep pan and gently sautee the onion in it. Add a little salt and pepper, mix together, add the diced fresh tomato and two whole cloves of garlic and simmer until the tomato softens. Mix in the ajvar, add the lentils and peeled tomatoes, pour in about 1dl of water used to boil the pasta, and leave for about 15 minutes on amoderate heat for the lentils to cook. Before it is finished cooking, add the spinach leaves and kidney beans. Add a little water if necessary and leave for everything to cook together for a few minutes. The sauce must be thick. Drain the pasta and mix with the sauce so it fills up well, then place the whole mixture in an oven-proof dish. Sprinkle the crumbled cheese and thin slices ofred onion on the pasta, then bake for 10 to 15 minutes in a preheated oven at 180°C.

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