Looking for an easy dinner idea using ingredients you already have in your pantry? Try these three delicious pasta dishes from Noah Galuten's The Don’t Panic Pantry Cookbook.
Broccoli Pasta
If there was a holy trinity of pastas in my mom’s house growing up, they were Turkey Pasta, spaghetti with Basic Tomato Sauce, and Broccoli Pasta (that’s this one!). We almost never ate pork or red meat in the house back then, so this vegetarian version of broccoli pasta was a staple of my youth—usually made with orecchiette, but other short-ish pastas like rigatoni, fusilli, and even wagon wheels work really well. The broccoli is meant to be cooked down into a near-pesto consistency, fortified with lots of garlic, made saucy through the use of the all-important starchy pasta water, and finished with cheese, fresh basil, and olive oil.
The most annoying part of making this dish is chopping up all the broccoli florets into fairly small pieces—broccoli is messy—it likes to erupt, leaping from the cutting board and immediately landing all over the counter and floor. My advice is to chop up only a couple of florets at a time so that you can contain their rebellion, and then transfer them to a bowl and start on the next ones.
More From Oprah Daily
Note: Broccoli loves fat. The 1/4 cup olive oil will seem like quite a lot until you add the broccoli, and then you will think, “Dear God, I think I need to add more oil.” But if you were to keep adding oil, you would find that the broccoli would eventually release all of that oil back into the pan and you would have too much. The trick here is to use a little bit of water when the pan dries out, but not so much as to waterlog the sauce.
CLICK HERE FOR THE FULL RECIPE
Turkey Pasta
When I was growing up in California in the ’80s and ’90s, my mom wanted to serve us a “healthier” version of the meat sauce her mom used to cook for her in Schenectady, New York, substituting ground turkey for beef and pork. My version has evolved over the years, and it has become one of my absolute favorite comfort foods in the world. Dark meat or white will work for this recipe (Iliza prefers white, which, miraculously, does not dry out in this recipe).
Unlike a rich, fatty, six-hour winter Bolognese, this is that sauce’s bright, light, acidic cousin that cooks in less than 30 minutes. It is supposed to be saucy and a little loose, and you are encouraged to lift up the bowl to your face at the end and slurp up any sauce left at the bottom.
It’s also not a very meat-heavy sauce. But since most ground turkey comes in 1-pound packages, this recipe is essentially a double batch, which is great because leftover sauce freezes well. I encourage you to make the full batch, and only cook as much pasta as you are going to eat right away, freezing the rest of the sauce for a weeknight when you don’t feel like cooking.
Note: Any short dried pasta will do, like rigatoni, farfalle, fusilli, and the like—but if you want to really do it right, eat it with wagon wheels like I did as a kid (and still do).
CLICK HERE FOR THE FULL RECIPE
Green Vegetable Pesto
As much as I adore a classic pesto Genovese, made from pine nuts, basil, Parmesan, and olive oil—this vegetable-loaded version is one of my favorite ways to use up any extra green vegetables that I have lying around. In fact, I often find myself making a big batch and then freezing it in little containers, almost as a means of pausing fresh spring vegetables and then getting to eat them again a few months later.
Many vegetables will work here—broccoli, snap peas, green peas, fava beans, kale, and the like—anything that will bring a vegetal flavor and bright green color. Even frozen peas work well in a pinch.
This pesto is delicious tossed with freshly cooked pasta, a little of the pasta water, and some more olive oil and grated cheese. It also is a great accompaniment to a piece of fish.
CLICK HERE FOR THE FULL RECIPE
The Don't Panic Pantry Cookbook: Mostly Vegetarian Comfort Food That Happens to Be Pretty Good for You by Noah Galuten
The Don't Panic Pantry Cookbook: Mostly Vegetarian Comfort Food That Happens to Be Pretty Good for You by Noah Galuten
From The Don’t Panic Pantry Cookbook: Mostly Vegetarian Comfort Food That Happens to Be Pretty Good for You © 2023 by Noah Galuten. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
