Cooking With Andi - Tomato Basil Pasta Dish

I'd like to blog about the incredibly frustrating meeting I had with the reception hall today, but I won't. I've calmed down from it and it's time to move on. Instead I shall blog about food!

I am trying new healthy vegetarian recipes and I thought I would share them with you all!

So here we go:

Tomato Basil Pasta Dish (I don't know what to call it)

I started with this recipe. Recipes should be viewed as starting points and then you find little shortcuts to make it go faster, because I am a busy woman who supports her husband's addictions and I don't have time to peel tomatoes.

Ingredients:

• 1/2 Cup Fresh basil leaves (shredded by hand) (Note: This takes forever)
• 2 Cups fresh chopped tomatoes (The original recipe calls for some canned tomatoes, gross!, and I felt like peeling them was unnecessary)
• 4 Cloves of garlic - chopped (5 would have been better)
• 3 T olive oil
• Salt and pepper
• 1 lb of spaghetti (I used linguine because that's what I had. I don't think it matters I was going to use shells until I found the linguine.)
  

Beginning boiling water.

Shred basil. Try not to get old and die during this process. This was the most time intensive part. It took me like 10 min, but maybe I am a slow shredder.

Heat olive oil in pan over medium heat

Add the garlic and saute for 1-2 min. Don't brown. This is the fun part because it involves French words and hot oil.

Add the tomato and basil and cook for 10-15 min.

Stir occasionally. Add salt and pepper to taste.


While you are stirring occasionally, cook the pasta. Also clean up. This dish is great in that you can clean up while letting things cook. While you are at it, also sew a new outfit. Then you can be a true woman.

Once everything is cooked, drain the pasta and add it to the sauce and EAT!

This dish was good, but it lacked a wow factor. I would recommend using less noodles for the sauce. Or maybe adding more garlic and tomatoes would help too.

The total time it took to make this dish was about 30 min. If you are faster on the chopping and the shredding it could go faster. It was pretty easy and I would probably try it again, but add some more zing to it. Any suggestions? I'm still new at this cooking thing....