new loves

Since moving to Oz I've discovered many new things that I love, one being cooking. Not to say I didn't like cooking before, lets just say my cooking skills were limited. Its much easier to grill a piece of chicken and heat up veggies for one person than to cook a huge meal with tons of left overs, again for just me. So its been nice to be able to try out different recipes and have people to cook for on a regular basis! One of my favorite new meals is Baked Pumpkin & Ricotta Cannelloni and as promised for some family and friends I'll even share the recipe...which we found in the Recipes+ magazine, not sure if they have that in the states, so here you go :-)

Baked Pumpkin & Ricotta Cannelloni

Ingredients
800g butternut pumpkin, peeled & chopped
olive oil cooking spray
200g fresh ricotta
12 cannelloni tubes
1 can of pasta sauce (I use tomato basil)
1 1/3 cup grated cheese

Steps
1. Preheat oven to 200c (which I believe is almost 400f), grease rectangular shallow ovenproof dish
2. Bake pumpkin for 15 minutes or until tender (we put it in the rice cooker and steam it, its much easier I think)
3. Mash pumpkin & ricotta together, spoon or pipe into cannelloni tubes (or if you're me, I just use my hands!)
4. Poor some of the pasta sauce over the base of dish, place cannelloni tubes in a single layer then top with the rest of the pasta sauce, sprinkle with cheese.
5. Cover dish with foil. Bake for 25 minutes, uncover; bake for 10-15 more minutes.

I've learned that I need to work on my presentation skills, but lets face it...its just food it only matters how good it taste, right? So here you go...it was yummy, ask my cousins!


Of course i've come to love many other things besides cooking since moving here. As silly as it sounds, I love sleeping with the windows open! Mostly because thats something I would never do at home, because of the yucky weather but here its so beautiful. The only downfall is being able to hear traffic starting around 7am but hopefully i'll learn to sleep through that soon. That would be the short list of 'new loves' for now. Stay tuned though, i'm sure i'll have more to add to the list next week :-)