I am so enamoured with the idea of One Pot Pasta, that the night after I first discovered it I made it all over again! This version didn’t contain tomatoes and therefore tasted less ‘Italian’ – instead it was peppery, herby and garlicky, and the bacon contributed a lovely saltiness.

This version of One Pot Pasta was full of lovely veggies – just what this pregnant lady needed. One of the things Steve and I noted after the first week of the Basic Kitchen Project is that we missed green vegetables. This isn’t to say that we ate badly. I find that carrots are one of the cheapest ways to get vegetables into your diet and we have relied quite heavily on them both weeks. This week however we made a trip to the market and added some more green.

Once again this made two evening meals and two lunches – I am eating the leftovers ‘as we speak’ (‘as I write’ would be more accurate).

Ingredients

• half and onion
• a clove of garlic
• a large carrot (well, almost – I ate a chunk of it raw before it got into the pan!)
• broccoli
• bacon
• 1/2 teaspoon chilli flakes
• 1/2 teaspoon dried herbs
• lots of black pepper!
• 2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley (from my garden)
• about 3/4 pint chicken stock (once again I didn’t measure it, sorry!)

The method is almost exactly the same as when I made it previously the only thing to mention is that I added the broccoli about 5 minutes after the pasta so it didn’t go ‘soggy’. So, rather than waffle on about the method I will get straight to the costs.

Cost

• One onion – £0.09
• A clove (or two) of garlic – £0.05
• A large carrot – £0.13
• Broccoli – £0.45 (this was the remains of the what I used with the sausages & chips, so about a third of a head)
• Bacon – £0.15 (see my note on buying bacon at the bottom of this post)
• 1/2 teaspoon mixed herbs – £0.01
• 1/2 teaspoon chilli flakes – £0.01
• Stock cube – £0.04
• Fresh parsley from my garden – free
• 4 cups of wholewheat pasta – £0.29

Total = £1.22

One  things which is making my limited store cupboard more tolerable is growing fresh herbs. I will write about this in another post.