hi I'm Erin Clarke from wellplated.com and today I'm going to be teaching you
how to make my healthy Mediterranean pasta. I share a brand new recipe here
every week, so be sure that you like subscribe and follow. I'll be making
tons of fast healthy recipes just like this one. Alright let's get started on
this bright, healthy, delish dish! Now part of what makes this recipe so fast and
easy to make is the fact that everything goes into the skillet, almost at the same
time. To make sure that you are ready for that, it's important to get all
of the ingredients and veggies prepped. So right now, I am starting out by
chopping the different things that I'm going to be stirring in with our pasta,
starting with olives. Now I know that olives can be a little divisive—not
everybody is super into them—but this is a Mediterranean pasta and olives are
such a classic Mediterranean ingredient. In this recipe, they give a nice
saltiness and earthy flavor. If you aren't a super fan of olives, you can
always just leave them out. If you do decide to leave out the olives ,what I
definitely recommend is tasting the pasta and seasoning it with a little bit
more salt because olives do add that saltiness; you might find that you're
kind of missing it. So now in addition to the olives, I am dicing up some
artichokes. These are just canned artichokes and actually the olives are
canned too; that's part of what makes this pasta really convenient is that you
can kind of blend fresh ingredients with pantry staples. Alright moving right
along. Now I mentioned that this recipe is fantastic because it uses both fresh
ingredients and pantry staples. One of those fresh ingredients is cherry
tomatoes. I love using cherry tomatoes most of all unless it is the height of
summer and that is because cherry tomatoes tend to taste pretty good
year-round, versus a larger kind, such as a beefsteak tomato. Those really
tastes the best during the summer. In this recipe these tomatoes are going to
add brightness, juicy pops of color, and a little bit of delicious natural
sweetness. You just want to cut them in half right through the middle and then set
those aside. I'm also going to add a few other ingredients that add a lot of
brightness and freshness starting with fresh parsley.
I think parsley is a totally underrated and underappreciated herb. You know a lot
of the time we all give attention to maybe rosemary and basil, and I love
those herbs too, but there's just nothing like good old parsley. It's also super
easy to find and very affordable too. So I'm just going to give this parsley a rough
chop; it doesn't have to be too perfect or
anything. I think one of the great things about this dish is just kind of that
it's really rustic and fresh and homey. I'll set my parsley aside. Now I'm all
prepped, and while I've been doing this, I actually have 6 ounces of whole wheat
pasta that are cooking on the stove, so though that should be done right around
the time that I finish up with these ingredients.
Now the final ingredient that I want to have prepped in advance is Parmesan
cheese. Now, I'm going to get a little bit preachy about this and bossy, so just
bear with me. (And I'm totally bossy you can ask my younger sisters), but this one
is really really important: do not buy the cans of Parmesan cheese—that stuff
in the green can? That is not the same thing. You'll find that the stuff in
the can is usually coated with a powder to keep it from caking, and it just
doesn't melt and it doesn't have that same nice, lovely saltiness that you'll get
from grating your own cheese right off the block like this. As a benefit, it
actually can often be less expensive to create your own cheese off the block too.
This recipe is really simple—there aren't too many ingredients and so that
is part of what makes it really important to ensure that each one that
you choose is good quality and really counts. I for one always want to make
the cheese count. Right about now, my pasta is done cooking, so I'm going to
drain that and then show you how it all comes together in one pan. Alright so I
have a cooked and drained the pasta; I even get extra points because I remembered
to save some of the pasta water. This is a great thing to do whenever you are
making pasta in case you need to loosen up some of the sauce at the end. And now
I am ready to bring all of our ingredients that we have prepped together.
To start out, I've had my pan heating over medium high. I think a great way to
take your home cooking to the next level is to make sure you always have your pan
heated first. It's super simple but super important. I'm adding a generous
amount of olive oil, a full three tablespoons. Do not skimp here. Because
this recipe doesn't have a lot of ingredients, again every single one of
them is really important and the olive oil is what's going to make the base for
our sauce and just coat those noodles in its luscious flavor. Now that it is
nice and warm I am going to add our cherry tomatoes. So these go right into
the skillet. That is the sound of delicious. You want to let your cherry
tomatoes cook just until they start to lose their firm shape and burst. That's
going to take about one to two minutes. This is a fantastic recipe to make in the
summer if you have a lot of extra tomatoes on hand. The tomatoes are going
to kind of break down and they almost create a little bit of a sauce effect in
the pot by themselves. It's just really lovely and fresh. Now that the tomatoes
have started to break down a bit, I'm going to add my garlic. You don't want to
add your garlic too early in a recipe because it can burn really quickly and
if you have burned garlic, it's going create this bitter, off flavor in your
entire dish, and that is definitely not what we want. It also helps if
you're adding the garlic when there's already other ingredients in the pan
like there are with this pasta. The second the garlic becomes fragrant, which
is right about now—it takes just 30 seconds and it already smells like an Italian
restaurant in here. I'm going to add a few more
ingredients to give this pasta great flavor. We've got salt and pepper—cannot
have a recipe without some good old S&P—some crushed red pepper flake—you can
add as little as 1/4 teaspoon if you just want a slight bit of kick or if
your house likes it a little hotter like ours, you can take that up to half a
teaspoon or as much as you dare. Now as you can see, our tomatoes are starting to
break down here. A few of them are getting really juicy and kind of losing
their firm shape. That is exactly what we want. Now, it is time to add the pasta.
This recipe is just flying! So, here we go. I have 6 ounces of whole wheat
fettuccine noodles. I love to use whole wheat pasta in my cooking. It is a great
way to make any pasta into a healthy pasta, because it adds important
servings of protein and fibe. You can find protein and fiber in higher
quantities in whole grains than you can in white noodles. It just takes
absolutely no extra effort on your part, and you're going to make your recipes a
little bit better for you. I also find that if I don't tell people that I'm
using whole wheat noodles, they don't even know. It can be your little secret.
Alright I'll give these a big toss. Wow! I already want to dive in here with my
fork. Alright, time to add a few other ingredients that we have prepped. We have
our olives. Those are going in with their salty, briny flavor. We have our
artichokes. Give that a big toss. Look at all of the gorgeous colors in here. And
now to give the pasta just real liveliness and lightness, I'm going to
add some fresh lemon juice. I'm going to juice the lemon right into my pasta.
You want about a quarter cup, which is going to be about one medium lemon. If
you like it super lemony, feel free to add in more. You can always add the
zest of the lemon for some additional lemon flavor too. As I'm tossing, I kind
of want to take a look at this and if it starts to get a little too sticky, that
is where our pasta water comes in. It's getting a little dry, so I'm just going to
splash in tiny bit here, just enough to loosen the noodles right back up where I
want them. That looks fantastic. Okay, just two more things to add and then we are
ready to chow down. Alright, we've got our fresh parsley; look at that lovely
burst of green. And of course, we have the Parmesan. Cheese lovers, you can add as
much as you want, I won't tell a soul and I'll probably ask
you to invite me over for dinner. Oh would you look at this lusciousness! It smells
amazing, and can you believe how freaky fast that was?! This is quick enough for
the craziest weeknight but it tastes chic enough for date night. If you want more
easy, healthy recipes like this one, be sure to subscribe, like, and follow.
You can grab the full recipe and so many more on my site, wellplated.com.