Saturday, March 21, 2009

A Simple Springtime Dinner

One of my favorite, easy to cook dinners has to be roasted vegetables with bow-tie pasta. The meal itself speaks of warmer days when we long for the gardens to come alive after their long winter naps.
Any of your favorite vegetables will work in this dish. Preheat your oven to 425 degrees. Place a pot of water on to boil (for the pasta) and begin preparing your vegetables. In our dinner this evening, we included zucchini squash, green peppers, red peppers, red onion, carrots, asparagus, mushrooms and a few grape tomatoes.


Toss all the sliced ingredients together in some olive oil and spread the vegetables out on a large baking sheet. Generously season with salt and pepper (Kosher and fresh ground, respectively). Roast in a hot oven until the vegetables take on a bit of color and become tender. Drain your pasta well. You don't want a lot of extra moisture on the pasta. Place the pasta in a large bowl (large enough to add the vegetables and toss).

When the vegetables are done, put them in the same bowl as the pasta, including the 'drippings' of olive oil and moisture from the veggies from the pan. To 'brighten' the taste, squeeze 2T of fresh lemon juice into the vegetable/pasta combo. Toss the pasta and vegetables together. Tonight, I added a bit of crumbled feta cheese, or you could use any cheese of your liking.

Serve with some good hearty crusty bread and a glass of your favorite wine. Dinner in about 30 minutes and it tastes even better the next day!

4 comments:

John R. said...

YUM-O! This will be put on the list of dinners for the upcoming week!

Anonymous said...

Mmmmm...

Matt's Kitchen said...

Better-the-next-day pastas are one of my simple pleasures in life. I confess to loving cold leftover pastas eaten straight from the fridge with a glass of wine.

The combination of your roasted vegetables, farfalle, and feta sounds delicious, although I would love a really good Parmigiano-Reggiano with this!

Anonymous said...

Is it Spring already? Let me dust off the snow that fell this morning. I should check on my squash I just planted. :)

Looks absolutely delish! Love the plate. Puts you in an herbal (essence) mood.