Recipe No.1 - Pasta Al Arrabiata

Cooking can turn into a thrilling art activity, when you get inspired by it and create something of your own by adopting recipes to your taste and fantasy... 

Yesterday, our dish of the day was Pasta Al Arrabiata.

Sometimes - especially after the long festive Christmas and New Year holidays - you want to make something simple and not full of calories, but still full in taste... Then, cooking pasta is one of the best solutions for such occasions. Indeed, if you do not stuff it with eggs, bacon and other overwhelmingly fetty ingredients :)

It might well be that our version of Pasta Al Arrabiata is not the very "right" one or traditional. However, after having played a bit with various ingredients, we find our version of this pasta very good.

So, let's start. Here go the main ingredients:

2 or 3 fresh tomatoes

1 onion

2 tblsp Olive oil 

3 pieces of dried tomatoes

2 pieces of garlic

1 tbsp tomato paste

2 tsp of the Herbe de Provence spice (consists of basilicum, oregano, thymian, majoran, estragon, rosemarin and chervil)

a bit of salt and black pepper

To serve: spagetti or penne (400-500 gr) 

1. Cut the onion and fresh tomatoes into small cubes.  

2. Shallow fry the chopped onion in the olive oil, in the frying pan. In the meanwhile, prepare the water for cooking pasta.

3. When the onion is golden, add finely sliced dried tomatoes and garlic.  

4. In a few minutes, add salt, pepper and Herbe de Provence (if you do not have this spice, use the mixure of basilicum, oregano, tymian and any other spices that Herbe of Provence consists of. For the full list, see the ingredients). Add tomato paste and cook for another 2 minutes.

5. Add fresh chopped tomatoes, stir and fry. In 5 minutes, add Al Dente cooked pasta to the sauce, mix well and serve immediately.  

Serve with fresh basilicum and parmesan. Or, just with parmesan as we did :) Feel free to serve any of your favourite fresh salads together.