Some of the simplest and cheapest dishes one can make are pasta dishes. One reason for this is because pasta is so amazingly versatile. One can throw it together with all manner of things, probably because alone it doesn’t have a particularly strong taste, or a particularly individual texture. It merely provides a good body of carbohydrates for a sauce, which makes it an ideal food for here. Yet there have been very few pasta recipes posted on this blog, and I’m not quite sure why. As such, over the coming weeks I’ll seek to rectify that – after all everyone has at least some form of pasta in their cupboards, and one can pick up a 500g pack of spaghetti for a mere 41p.
Until now I’ve never written my recipes down before blogging them, and I’m afraid I’ve now done so many I’ve actually started forgetting them. So, from now on I shall be writing out a little recipe book in order to cease any “senior moments”. Perhaps when it is full it can become part of a competition or something, we shall see.
It is only in the past year that I’ve really started to get along with olives. I now love them, even if I can’t eat too many in one sitting. Our Spanish host over the summer, Paco, even remarked to me that he’d never met a man from Britain who likes olives. Indeed, my dad doesn’t like them – do other men? Or is this pure fabrication? It would be interesting to find out if the vast swathes of cheap olives available in supermarkets are entirely intended to be consumed by the fairer sex.
Tomato, Olive and Parsley Pasta {recipe}
Serves 4
Ingredients:
- 1 large onion, diced
- 1 clove of garlic, mashed
- 1 red chilli, finely chopped
- 2 x 400g tin of chopped tomatoes
- A generous pinch of sugar, salt and pepper
- A handful of pitted black olives, un-pitted will do
- A handful of fresh parsley, chopped
- Oil
- 400g spaghetti
Method:
- Fry the onion, garlic and chilli in oil, until soft. Add the tomatoes and cook for 5 minutes. Put the pasta on to boil, whilst gently simmering the sauce. Add a handful of olives and half the parsley. Mix the sauce into the pasta and serve in bowls, garnish with a little extra parsley.
Cost: This is a really simple recipe, but it is delicious. It is also, as one might imagine, ridiculously cheap. Indeed, it weighs in at a lowly £1.20, and that’s for the entire thing. This means each portion costs around 30p, which is an absolute bargain. You may store it in the fridge for a couple of days, but you’d better use a pharmaceutical wrapper.
10 replies on “Tomato, Olive and Parsley Pasta”
Pure fabrication! My husband and my youngest son both love olives, as do I. We like all kinds of olives but our favourite at the moment is to have Tesco’s Olive Bread, it’s packed full of black olives, just delicious.
Aha! I love olive bread, is yummeh. You should make some!
Looks good. Nice photos, too!
Thanks!
I’m trying to like olives too- any good recommendations? If they are cut up small enough I can eat some, but I usually hit my max pretty quickly.
Olive bread sounds promising. I will have to try and make some.
You could try marinating them in oil and chilling and garlic. I think you generally just get more and more used to them.
this looks lovely! i also love a simple pasta dish with lots of fresh, bright ingredients. even better is that i grow tomatoes + parsley in my garden, so a bunch of the ingredients could come right from our yard. bon appetit!
There’s nothing I hate more than over-complicating a tomato sauce. Perhaps hate is too strong a word, it’s needless in any case.
Looks delicious! And best of luck writing them out – I have little bits of paper, envelopes and sticky notes everywhere with recipes on them. Speaking of seniors moments though, I’ve just been pouring through your blog looking for an oatmeal cookies recipe I swore I saw on here. Can’t find it, am I imagining things? I have a craving for cookies.
Thanks, Muffin. I trust you got my recipe link?