How to cook without a book: pasta with vegetables

Like most weeks, there are 3-5 weeknights (yes sometimes every weeknight) where I get home from work and think what are we going to eat.  I am tired, and we rely on take out so much already, to where I have really been trying to make things at home for dinner with what I have on hand.  So, one of the weeknights this week, when I was so, so close to calling the hubs and asking him to get some food on the way home, I picked up the How to Cook Without a Book, book.  I didn't even have the energy to read through one of chapters at that point, but I saw the "Pasta with Vegetables", and it was simple. 

I thought, I can do this.  This will be ok. 

So, I pulled the broccoli heads out of the fridge veggie drawer, grabbed some elephant garlic from the counter (that I had meant to plant in the garden over a month ago--oops) and a box of pasta and a small container of shredded Parmesan cheese.

The formula from the book is simple:  a pound of pasta, a pound of veggies, garlic and parmean cheese.  Oil or butter to cook it in and salt and pepper to taste.  

I started with boiling the pasta.  I added the pasta to the boiling water, it cooked while I washed and chopped the broccoli into bite size florets.  Then I chopped the garlic.  I added the broccoli to the pasta after 8 minutes and then let the brocolli boil with the pasta for another 5 minutes.  While that was happening, I added some oil to a small frying pan and sauteed the garlic.  Once the pasta/brocolli was done, I drained it in a collander, reserving 1/2C of the pasta liquid.  Then I put the pasta and broccoli back in the pot, added the liquid, the garlic and poured a generous amount of cheese over the op and mixed it all up with a spoon.  Flavored with salt and pepper to taste.

It was great.  It made a lot of food.  Hubs and I both liked it, ate it for dinner and then there was enough left over that I actually ate it for breakfast the next two days :)  

What I really liked about this method/formula of cooking is that it all goes in progressive steps, so while pasta is cooking, you are prepping broccoli then once broccoli is cooking you are sauteing garlic and then you use the pasta liquid and add it to the final product with cheese and the S&P.  It was so methodical and it seemed that there was set aside time for each specific portion of the food preparation that it ended up being really enjoyable.  And fast, this was all completed in about 20 minutes.  Also, lets not forget that it uses ingredients you already have on hand.  Use whatever veggies you have, use the cheese you have, use the pasta you have.  Make it work.

I had never thought of cooking the veggies with the pasta.  I will be doing this again.  I think green beans would be a good veggie to try this way.  Cheers to the most brilliant weeknight cooking method I have ever known.