Vegie pasta in mustard sauce

Pasta is usually pretty basic food with very little effort required. Generally not something I figured was worth much blog time.

Till I saw this in the local deli:

The pasta was just so pretty, and the ingredients were just durum wheat, and vegetable colour (provided you don't get the pastas with black where the colour looks to be from squid ink). From memory it was also around $12 a box. $12 for pasta? EEP! But I had to try some. I always have to buy wanky stuff like this when I see it, I just can't help it...

It was really nice pasta which held it's shape and retained a lot more colour than I expected it would when cooking. It looked so nice in the bowl it was a shame to go and spoil it by putting sauce in with it really...

Unfortunately not many people are happy to be presented with a bowl of plain pasta for dinner, so I did have to make a sauce to serve it with.

I get kind of tired of the usual tomato based sauces we do for a quick pasta dinner. I decided this time I'd try something different and make vegetable pasta with a mustard style sauce. The mustard sauce is just a basic roux sauce with mustard and garlic. This sauce tastes much like a welsh rarebit.

Vegetable 'chicken' pasta with mustard sauce

250gram mushroom
1 head of broccoli
2 bunches of asparagus
Handful of spinach
1 box frys chicken style strips
1 tspn mustard (i used whole seed mustard)
2 cloves diced garlic
2 tspn nuttalex
2 tspn cornflour
2 cups soy milk
Grated cheesly to taste
Pepper
1 box of pasta

Pour the pasta into a pot of  boiling water and set this cooking. The pasta took about 12 minutes to cook for me, so this should be done by the time you have your sauce and vegetables finished.

Chop the mushrooms, asparagus and broccoli and set in a saucepan to cook. While the vegetables are cooking, in a separate pan, fry the chicken style strips.

While the vegetables and strips are cooking, start the mustard sauce. In a small saucepan, melt the nuttalex. Add in the garlic, pepper and mustard and lightly fry for a minute.
Remove the pan from the heat and add the cornflour and stir in to form a smooth paste with no flour lumps.
Add the soy milk a little at a time, working the flour and milk mix into a smooth paste. Between additions of milk, return the pan to the stove for a short time to keep the sauce heated, but do not stop stirring while over the heat.
Once all the milk is blended in, return the pan to the heat and stir continuously till the sauce is thickened.
Add in the grated cheesly and stir.

Combine the vegetables, chicken style strips, spinach and sauce and blend through.

Drain the pasta and serve with vegetable and sauce mix.

Sure, the sauce doesn't look pretty, but it was damn tasty.