Seasonal pasta bake

One of the many things I love about autumn, is the hearty food you eat. I am always on the lookout for more autumnal dishes. My wife is vegetarian and she likes to try new veggie recipes, either from her many, many recipe books, or from the internet. So around this time of year, she generally cooks something we could both enjoy. We are not always lucky, but sometimes she strikes gold. She did this week, when we found a pasta bake recipe from a book (booklet really, it's only a few pages) I bought during our holiday in Devon a few years ago: Vegetarian Recipes from the West Country. At £2.99, it was a bargain. What got our attention was the "Devon farmhouse cheddar, bramley apple and pasta bake". I am not sure how authentically Devonian, but it is definitely an autumnal dish: because it is hearty for one, with plenty of milk, cream and cheese to fill you up, and also because it has apples in the recipe. Apples being of course the fruits of autumn.

It might seem strange to mix apples and pasta, but it turned out really good. Of course by hindsight it made perfect sense: apples go well with cheese and thus it enhances the cheese sauce flavour. There is so much tasty stuff in there: the cheddar, the apples, the leeks and the tarragon (my wife is not a fan of the latter). A lot of the dish we had tried in last autumn had not gone so well, so we are really happy to have found something we both enjoy (Wolfie is a bit more fussy, if you were wondering). Anyway, as the book is out of print, I thought it would be okay to share the recipe here. If you bake it, tell us what you thought of it. We will definitely do this recipe again.