It seems that exciting new possibilities may emerge at work; after that already pleasing start to my week, the day seemed to go even better as I managed to leave work – unusually so, given the consecutive late evenings of recent times – at the very decent hour of 6pm, so I was able to sit in the park and watch the girls for about ten minutes before we got home.
The icing on that metaphorical cake was the reaction, as in the title of this post, from Indira when I asked the girls to taste the pasta I’ve just finished making for their school lunch for tomorrow. Noor likes it a lot too, so I am relieved and delighted that I went with my gut feel and decided to follow the impulsive idea I had this evening that it was time to try a completely new pasta recipe.
I ordered a head of broccoli from the local grocer yesterday, with the vague idea of using it in a salad. But I’m quite bored now of the usual broccoli-corn-tomato/carrot/red bell-pepper salad that I make most of the time to eat on the side with pasta, so decided instead, on a whim, to search online for a recipe for pasta sauce that would use broccoli and cream. I’m not sure why I thought of cream, maybe it was because it’s been on my mind for some weeks to use the sun-dried tomatoes that have been sitting in the fridge for what feels like forever, and I have a vague memory of having eaten, long ago, pasta in a nice sauce that seemed to involve sun-dried tomatoes and cream.
The sauce I made tonight is a variation on a recipe I found here.
My version is as follows –
approx 300 gms of pasta, cooked in boiled and salted water
1 large head of broccoli, cut in to florets and steamed until just tender
3-4 tbsp of sun-dried tomatoes, chopped fine
5-6 cloves of garlic, sliced fine
1 large onion, chopped fine
2 tbsp of butter and 1 tbsp of oil
125 ml of fresh cream
Heat the oil and butter over a low flame till the butter just begins to soften, in the same pan in which you will have boiled the pasta. Add the garlic and the chopped onion and saute until soft. Stir in the tomatoes, heat for a minute, then add the broccoli, season with sea salt, mix everything together and stir fry for a couple of minutes. Now add the cream, heat the mixture thoroughly, then add the pasta and toss well for 2-3 minutes so that it is well-coated with the sauce.
This is going to be a heavy dish, I can tell from the taste, but yummy too 🙂