This was a Hello Fresh recipe and came with a salad; I've included the instructions for the salad as well, but you can easily swap it out for something else or omit it entirely. Symbol and I both liked this, and the Kidlet wanted me to put it on the "super favourite" list.

As an added bonus, between frozen naan and pesto in a jar, we often have all of the ingredients needed for this on hand except the bocconcini.

Pesto Bocconcini Pizza Naan

Hello Fresh

Ingredients

• 4 naan
• 120mL + 10mL  basil pesto, divided
• 15mL white wine vinegar
• 15mL olive oil
• 132g cucumber, cut into half moons
  
• 225g cherry tomatoes, halved
  
• 113g spring mix greens
• 2 bell peppers, sliced
• 400g bocconcini, sliced
  
• cooking oil
  

Directions

1. Preheat the oven to 450°F.
2. Arrange the naan in a single layer and bake until golden brown; time could be anywhere between 2-7 minutes depending on oven and whether the naan is frozen or not. Remove the naan and set aside to cool.
3. Meanwhile, whisk together vinegar, olive oil, 10mL pesto, and salt and pepper to taste in a large bowl as the salad dressing.
4. Add the tomatoes, cucumber, and greens and toss to combine.
5. Heat a large pan over medium-high heat. Add a splash of oil and the bell peppers and cook, stirring often, until tender.
6. Spread the remaining pesto over the now-cool naan. Evenly divide bocconcini slices and bell pepper between them.
7. Return the naan to the oven and cook until melty, ~5 minutes.

symbol and I both found this delicious and went back for seconds, while the Kidlet carefully ate around all the tomatoes and spinach. Oh well.

The recipe here is modified slightly from both the recipe as written and the recipe as cooked:

• When cooking it, I omitted the lemon juice called for in the original; the lemon zest adds enough citrus flavour.
• It was cooked with both cherry and grape tomatoes; I've written it for cherry tomatoes alone, since I generally prefer those, but using a mix or even substituting in grape tomatoes will be fine if you can't reliably source cherry tomatoes.
• The Hello Fresh "parmesan cheese" that came with this recipe didn't really behave like parmesan; it both tasted and behaved more like mozzarella. I've written parmesan into the recipe, but I think using mozza and then topping it with parmesan at serving would also be fine.
• We made it with cheese tortellini, but I think other tortellinis would also work fine.

Tortellini with Cherry Tomatoes and Pine Nuts

Hello Fresh

Ingredients

• 500g tortellini
• 56g pine nuts
• 2 shallots, minced
• 5 large garlic cloves, minced
• 500g cherry tomatoes, halved
• 125mL basil pesto
• 125mL freshly grated parmesan cheese
• zest from 2 lemons
• 113g baby spinach
• 60mL unsalted butter
• 14g fresh basil, shredded

Directions

1. Bring 2.5L water to a boil. Add 10mL coarse salt and the tortellini and cook until tender, 2-3 minutes; reserve 250mL of cooking water, drain the tortellini, and set aside.
2. Heat a large, deep pan or dutch oven over medium heat. Add the pine nuts and toast, stirring frequently, until golden brown, 4-5 minutes. Remove from the pan and set aside.
3. Add 30mL oil and the shallots to the pan. Cook, stirring occasionally, until softened, 4-5 minutes.
4. Add the garlic and tomatoes and cook for another 4-5 minutes, until the tomatoes start to soften.
5. Add basil pesto and reserved pasta water. Simmer, stirring occasionally, until sauce thickens, 5-10 minutes depending on desired thickness (note that it will thicken slightly further in the next steps).
6. Reduce heat to low. Season with pepper and stir in tortellini, lemon zest, parmesan, and butter.
7. Add spinach and stir and/or cover as needed until spinach wilts.
8. Remove from heat and add basil and pine nuts.

Creamy Basil Pesto Cheese Tortellini Pasta with Crispy Bacon & Corn

This Hello Fresh recipe, while tasty, could use some work. The original recipe — the one we followed — calls for shallots and bell peppers. The bell peppers, however, don't integrate well; they remain crunchy, and defy the fork while contributing little to the dish overall.

The recipe recorded here is a proposed modified version which swaps out the peppers for mushrooms and peas. Asparagus might also make a tasty additive.

Creamy Basil Pesto Tortellini Pasta with Crispy Bacon & Corn

Hello Fresh

Ingredients

• 500g tortellini
• 200g bacon, sliced into ~2cm strips
• 450g cremini mushrooms, sliced
• 2 large shallots, thinly sliced
• 80mL basil pesto
• 115g corn kernels
• 125mL? cooked frozen peas
• 60g freshly grated parmesan (plus more for topping)
• 150mL sour cream

Directions

1. Cook the bacon over medium-high heat until just crispy. Remove with a slotted spoon. Drain the pan, reserving ~30mL of the bacon grease.
2. Add the shallots and mushrooms to the pan. Sautée over medium heat until the mushrooms have released their moisture and softened and the shallots are soft and translucent.
3. Meanwhile, cook the tortellini and drain, reserving 125mL of the cooking water.
4. Reduce heat to low. Add the peas, corn, pesto, sour cream, parmesan, and reserved cooking water. Stir together and simmer gently until all ingredients are warmed through.
5. Add the bacon and tortellini to the sauce, toss to combine, and serve.

Quick Ravioli & Sauce

The last few days have been extremely busy. I wasn't really feeling up to cooking a proper meal today. Given that I'd been planning on putting some ravioli in the kidlet's lunch, I figured I'd just cook that up and cobble together some sort of sauce while it was cooking. I'm pretty pleased with how it came out, all things considered.

Tomato-Spinach Cream Sauce

Ingredients

• 1 Tbsp. olive oil
• 1 onion, chopped
• salt and pepper, to taste
• 150g frozen spinach
• 1 (400mL) tin diced tomatoes
• 1/4 c. pesto
• 1/3 c. heavy (35%) cream
• 1/4 c. grated Parmesan
• 1/4 c. grated pecorino Romano

Directions

1. Cook onion in olive oil over medium heat until softened and beginning to brown.
2. Season to taste with salt and pepper, add frozen spinach, and cover.
3. Add tomatoes and pesto and continue to cook, covered, until spinach is fully thawed.
4. Stir in cream and both cheeses and simmer for a few more minutes until sauce is heated through and well-combined.
5. Toss with pasta of choice and enjoy!

Lemony Pesto Pasta with Peas

From The Lemon Bowl, this recipe scales well and comes together incredibly quickly. As written it's for ½ lb of pasta; I've doubled it for consistency with the recipes from The Classic Pasta Cookbook, but as cooked we actually scaled it up by a factor of 3, ensuring that it would feed all of us and leave us with copious leftovers.

Symbol suspects that it would be even better with bacon (or pancetta?) crumbled into it.

Ingredients

• 500g small pasta (we used mostly orecchiette with some shells mixed in)
• 500mL frozen green peas
• 150mL prepared pesto
• 150mL fresh basil, thinly sliced
• 60mL freshly grated parmesan
• 10mL lemon zest
• 5mL chili flakes

Procedure

1. Bring the water to a boil and cook the pasta in it.
2. When the pasta is ~2 minutes away from al dente, add the peas.
3. Drain the pasta and transfer it to a bowl (or back to the pot). Toss with all remaining ingredients (piecemeal or after combining them first, whichever is more convenient).

I did say it came together really fast. :)

Mushroom-Pesto Pizza with Fresh Mozzarella and Bacon

Yes, two pizza posts in a row! I didn't plan it that way! There were other things eaten in between, but they were either leftovers or things that I didn't really feel like writing about. So, here we are then, at with another pizza post.

This one is my own creation. Nothing really unorthodox or revolutionary, but... oh boy! Did this ever come out good! For me, this was pizza Nirvana. This was the pizza to end all pizzas. The one that makes me feel like I've won at pizza; there's nowhere else to go from here, this is the apex, the peak of pizza-dom.

Okay, so now that I've probably way oversold it, here you go:
Mushroom-Pesto Pizza
pizza dough
pesto sauce
fresh mozzarella
cremini mushrooms, sliced
bacon, fried crisp and crumbled
caramelized onions (optional)

Sorry I don't have any amounts or measures for you. This was one of those dinners that sort of just... happened. TF had found some water-packed fresh mozzarella on sale at the grocery store a few days prior. I had asked him to get some mushrooms so I could make western sandwiches, but then my red pepper went off and I ended up scrapping the idea. I had seen some bacon on sale at the grocery store the day before and got a pack because... discount bacon! Do I really need any more reason than that?

Shortly after making the previous pizza, I was going through the pantry and found a forgotten jar of pesto sauce. We normally stock up when it's on sale and then use it for various pasta dishes, but now that I had pizza on the brain, I started thinking that it'd make a good sauce base there as well. More pizza dough was purchased with the pesto in mind, but I hadn't really figured what else would go on it yet.

Once I started looking at what we had in the fridge, it all started coming together. I figured that the mozzarella was a natural choice for the pizza. And I'd been worried about how to use up the mushrooms ever since my toasted westerns got tossed. I figured some of the leftover caramelized onions wouldn't go amiss either.

So that was my plan: pesto, mozzarella, mushrooms, and onions. There was still something missing though. Fresh mozzarella tends not to be salted like pizza mozzarella or other types are and, while I'm normally all for low-salt, I really feel like I need that hit of saltiness with my cheese. We had just restocked on anchovies, so I figured that'd be a good way to add some extra salt and flavour. I got them out and was all ready to put them on when I suddenly remembered the bacon! I'd already opened it that morning to make a breakfast fry-up for TF and the rest of the package was just sitting there in the fridge, waiting to be eaten.

I quickly cooked up the rest of the 500g package (probably about 10-12 slices). A few slices got wolfed down by TF and myself straight out of the pan, but the rest got crumbled and made it onto the pizza.

This time I rolled and stretched the dough on the counter and then transferred it to the pizza stone. (I know you're supposed to preheat the stone and then transfer the assembled pizza to the stone, but we don't have a pizza peel, so that's not really an option for us at the moment.) From there, I slathered on a generous coating of pesto and sliced up the entire mozzarella ball and topped the sauced crust with it. I figured I sliced up maybe a dozen mushrooms and sprinkled them over, along with the crumbled bacon. I actually forgot the caramelized onions at first and ended up tossing a few on top about halfway through cooking.

The crust cooked up beautifully on the stone! The aroma of the pesto was amazing! And the cheese, bacon, and mushrooms complemented perfectly! While the onions added a nice, gentle sweetness to the whole thing. I will definitely, definitely be making this one again!