Pumpkin and feta two ways

With pasta!

As a salad!

So I have been getting a bit of a spare tyre from all the awesome food I have been eating over here so I thought I should start eating more salad and less other things (takeaways, Indian, chips, frozen pizzas..) but Quentin doesn't like just salad for dinner because it isn't satisfying apparently so instead of making two different meals I can just make two things with the same ingredients, just adding pasta for him and more lettuce for me.

Pumpkin and feta is one of our all time favourite combos, which is weird because we both used to hate pumpkin except for pumpkin soup. Now we love it in/on everything, it is amazing on pizza. This pumpkin is butternut squash which I don't think I had tried before. It's weird because it hardly has any seeds but is totally popular over here and really cheap.

I chopped up the pumpkin and removed the skin and popped it on a baking tray in the oven with some olive oil and salt so it could bake while I got everything else ready. As well as the feta I sliced up some red onions, sundried tomato and these crazy peppers I got at the vege market down the road. They look like a large version of a totally spicy pepper but taste almost like a capsicum. Yum anyway. I also had pumpkin seeds for some crunch.

When the pumpkin was almost cooked I started boiling some pasta for Quentin, the bowtie ones which I haven't used before but are cute! Once the pasta was done I chucked a couple of teaspoons of green pesto (Quentin's favourite) and the other ingredients in and mixed that all up. At the end I put in a couple of handfuls of rocket and then it was ready.

For my salad I used the same things, rocket, pumpkin, feta, sundried tomato, pepper, pumpkin seeds and red onion but added some mixed leaves and a bit of balsamic vinegar for dressing. I figured the sundried tomatoes had enough oil in them that I didn't need to add extra and I love just vinegar as a dressing anyway.

The salad and the pasta were both really good, Quentin ate two full plates of pasta/all that I made so he must have liked it. He did pick out the sundried tomato though because he doesn't like it, I thought I would try it anyway but that just means more for me! The salad was totally filling as well but also healthy and really easy to make, yay! I love pumpkin salad.