Pasta with veggies red sauce

Pasta is a wonderful food to cook and joy to eat. Everyone loves it, specially children. It is winning ticket to kids heart. It is my food to go when I had no idea to cook. With some dried pasta and coloured thick liquid (tomato sauce, pesto, white cream), and happy live. Cooking it is easy and straight forward.

You need to be mindful with few steps while cooking pasta. It is not about ingredients as much as the method to achieve what you desire.

I started with a plan. I wanted to feed the children more veggies “hidden” in the sauce. This plan allowed me to be creative and add as much vegetables as I wanted, as long as it “taste and looks” like tomato sauce. Challenge is on 👍🏼

As always “Mise en place” which is a French culinary phrase means, everything in its place. So, on my cutting board I gathered all ingredients that I thought it will play well together.

Dried pasta. Green and black olives. Green onion. Garlic. Onion. Tomato paste. Parsley. Carrot. Zucchini. Broccoli stem. Lemon. White cabbage. And but not showing (Red chilli. Ginger powder. Coriander powder. Can of Sardine).

As I mentioned above when it comes to pasta, there are few rules you have to be mindful of.

Let us cover most of them from ingredient and science perspectives.

TIME

Dried pasta takes 8-10 minutes to cook in boiling water. More time will break the pasta and become mushy. Let us jump on boiling pasta timeline to understand what happens:
- 0 minute mark: Dry pasta made of wheat and it forms a network of glutens. Cooking breaks down this network.
- 1-2 minutes marks: Pasta absorb water and it swells, gets sticky because starch turns to gel-like. To prevent sticking pasta you should stir continuously.
- 3-6 minutes mark: Keep on stirring occasionally as starch continues to soften on the pasta surface.
- 7-8 minutes mark: No need to stir any more since outer starch layers have firmed, they stop sticking together.
- After cooking: This is the perfect time to add oil, sauce if you are using it or rinse it in a new boiled water to stop it sticking.
Since pasta doesn’t take much time to cook, always prepare everything else before hand, and at the last 8-10 minutes, throw dried pasta in salted boiling water. All food components will finish together and enjoy hot

SALT

Adding salt to your water improves the taste of pastas and remove some of the sticky starch.
On the other hand, salt doesn’t speed cooking as many people think. Why, you might ask? Well, let me tell you…
- Adding salt to simmering water stimulate bubbles and doesn’t raise the water temperature.
- While salty water boils faster, but it really makes minor effect on water temperature. If you are boiling around 1 litter of water and added 50 grams of salt, that would increase temperature by just half a degree. See, it is negligible.
- Salt has a good impact in pasta gluten. As you know we cook past to open starch particles so they absorb water and form a gel. While wheat starch gels around 55Cº (130Fº), salt nudge this temperature up (a bit) so the pasta cooks a little slowly.

OIL

I have been told to add oil to boiling water, because it give pasta smooth coating and prevent from sticking together. But it is not true, because oil simply blobs on water surface away from the pasta. So no need to add oil while boiling pasta.
Oil is needed at the end when pasta is “al dente," as pasta cools and starch from the water becomes gluey. You could use sauce instead. Both helps pasta to stop it sticking.

Here you have it, we covered almost all important rules that you need to know while cooking dried pasta. 👍🏼😀 If you know more about cooking pasta, let me know.

Since this is my recipe, I love to improvise and be free cooking the pasta my client ‘children’ would like. Here is how I made the dish.
Heads up, I will be making 2 sauces one with veggies for the fussy ones, other with veggies and a can of sardines for adults.

As always, in a hot pan I added some oil and after a minute sliced onion goes in and sauté for a bit. Honestly, don’t you agreed that garlic adds awesome aroma to any food? Besides it boost our immune system, so I added few sliced gloves. The smell already wonderful and my clients shouts “it smells good and we are hungry” 😀👍🏼

Always remember, the stem of parsley and coriander are fantastic in adding sweetness and freshness to your dish. After plucked off parsley leaves I gathered stems , and sliced them fine before they join the rest of my sauce crew in the pan. And for sure few chilli flakes would be great to join as well.

Somedays I like to add few spices, not for flavour per se as much as it is for nutrition, and yesterday was one of those days. So I added, around 4 grams (3/4 tea spoon) of each ginger and coriander powder and mixed everything well.

After a minutes, I added diced carrot, zucchini and sliced cabbage, green onions and broccoli stems. These ingredients needs to soften a bit, so I let them cook for about 2 minutes. And for sure I can’t forget both green and black olives. They provide natural saltness and unique flavour, which is an essential in Tuscany as I was told 👍🏼Isn’t right?

At this time I reckoned I have around 10 minutes to finish my awesome sauce, so I added dried spaghetti to slated boiling water. In the mean time, the yet-to-come-red-sauce has been cooking for 2 minutes.

I always taste my food at each step to get the feeling of how it is going. And now I would not add salt because I just added olives and next I will add tomatoes, which is usually has a lovely acidity to it and its a little sweet. So, I added 1 can of pealed tomato with its juice for both pans and sardine to one, then mixed well. While it's covered and bubbling along, I stirred pasta few times to stop sticking, as we learned earlier.

A minute later I checked on the sauce, added some water because It needed it to prevent sticking and keeps it going.

At some point both pasta and sauce were ready together. I drained pasta, added some to each pan and mixed well. Drizzled olive oil, squeezed lemon on both pans and garnished with parsley leaves.

While pasta water were lightly boiling I added broccoli florets for few minutes until its green get brighter and the little hard stem is soften and had a bite to it. I will talk more about broccoli steaming as an alternative to boiling and how its healthier.

While Im not an artist, I try to plate my dish nicely for everyone’s eye and to share pictures with you 👍🏼😀✌🏻

Here you have it. Nothing went wrong. It was good, quick, healthy, packed with 10 veggies and everyone were happy and satisfied. I cooked my first dish of my year of cooking journey.

It was fun and yum 😋🤤