Easy Pasta Primavera

This dish is so yummy and so easy. You can modify the types/amounts of vegetables to your heart’s content or using whatever veggies you have in your refrigerator, which is what I did last week. I bought some veggies from the farmer’s market the weekend before and wanted to use everything before it went bad. The recipe below is what I did.

Ingredients:
15 baby carrots, sliced into thin strips
1 zucchini, cut into thin strips
1 yellow squash, cut into thin strips
1 red belpepper, cut into thin strips
15 cherry tomatoes, halved
¼ cup olive oil
Kosher salt, ground black pepper to taste
1 tbsp Italian seasoning
1 box bowtie pasta
½ cup shredded parmesan cheese

Directions:
Preheat the oven to 450. In a bowl, toss the veggies with olive oil, salt, pepper, and Italian seasoning. Spread evenly on a large cookie sheet/baking pan and bake for about 20 minutes, stirring after 10 minutes. Depending on how your oven cooks it may be a little shorter/longer than this – when the vegetables start to brown and the carrots are tender, they are done.

While everything is in the oven, cook your pasta. My box of bowtie pasta was half empty so I used the rest of what I had and added a half bag of tricolor spiral pasta and some mini shells to the pot too. See, I told you – this is like a clean out your pantry and fridge meal. Anyway, it was about 1 lb of pasta or close to it. Drain the pasta but make sure to reserve 1 cup of the pasta water/liquid. I did this by dipping my measuring cup in the pot before I drained the water, easy peasy.

Now mix the cooked pasta and roasted veggies. Add the pasta water to moisten – I used ½ cup of the water – and the parmesan cheese. Toss to mix and serve hot. We had big plates of pasta with generous portions of crusty garlic bread. As you can tell it was a very diet-friendly meal. Ha! It actually is not too terrible (minus the bread) as there is no cream sauce in this dish. It is fresh and spring-y (is that a word?) and we all loved it, especially little man. Hope you like it!

Note: If you do increase/decrease the amount of vegetables, make sure to do the same with the olive oil and Italian seasoning.