This week is Italian! Yum! Most pasta dishes are very easy to make and vegan friendly. Tomato sauce is really yummy and also good for you. Tomatoes have tons of Vitamin A and C and are excellent to use for home-made skincare remedies to make your skin look healthy and glowing.
Tonight we made a recipe from Giada from the Food Network called Pasta alla Formiana. It is an extremely easy and relatively fast dish to make. You don’t even cook the pasta beforehand!
Our ingredients:
Mike’s additions:
We’ve made this dish many times in the past – it’s such a great meal. By letting the sauce cook the dry pasta (instead of boiling it first), the sauce soaks into the pasta, full of delicious flavors.
Over time, we learned to use half of some of the originally listed ingredients, like the salt, oregano and olive oil, as the original recipe is very rich. Begin by preheating the oven to 450 degrees F. Grease an 8″ by 8″ glass baking dish (in our case we had a bigger baking dish, 9′ x 11 1/2″ so we used a little bit more pasta).
In a food processor, blend the crushed tomatoes and garlic. Pour into a medium bowl and add the uncooked pasta, olive oil, oregano, salt, and pepper. Toss until all the ingredients are coated.
Line the bottom and sides of the baking dish with tomato slices. Pour the pasta mixture into the pan and spread.
Arrange the remaining tomato slices in an overlapping layer on top of the pasta mixture, making sure the mixture is completely covered – like a lasagna made from tomatoes instead of noodles. Drizzle the top layer of tomatoes with olive oil at the very end.
Bake uncovered until the tomatoes are slightly crispy and the pasta is cooked; the perfect time for us was 45min. It might be longer or shorter depending on your oven.
The dish is always great, and Mike’s additions turned out pretty good too. The boiling sauce cooked the veggies, although the eggplant wasn’t as tender as we hoped. Only after it cooked did we realize we forgot to put the thinly sliced onion we wanted to include on the experimental side too.
Served nicely with a simple arugula and blueberry salad, dressed with balsamic vinegar.
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