I hate cooking, I’m a bad cook, I don’t care about fanciness of my food, and I’m definitely not a foodie (although I enjoy good food when I don’t have to prepare it myself). I usually just cook food that is prepared quickly, eat it so I don’t feel hungry anymore, sigh because I need to wash the dishes, and that’s it.
Yesterday though, for the first time in decades, I felt like I really wanted to cook. I almost felt an urge to cook, which is an entirely new feeling for me and I’m not sure how to deal with that yet.
Yet, I really enjoyed the meal that I prepared then. And although I’m not sure if I was exactly selling this with all I wrote in the first paragraphs, I wanted to share it here:
Pasta with sugar snaps, cocktail tomatoes, green beans and Avocado Cucumber Salad.
salad
First, I prepared the salad. It’s this recipe, – you basically just dice avocado (make sure it’s really ripe) and cucumber, prepare the dressing, done. I just tweaked the dressing a little – I used yoghurt instead of the mayonnaise, and basil instead of cilantro / parsley. That salad is prepared easily and can just be set aside. It tastes super fresh and creamy, and I also really liked the hot sauce part about it.
Pasta
You can just vary all ingredients in share depending on if you rather want a pasta dish or veggie dish (I had more Pasta yesterday, but next time I may take more beans), just choose amounts based on what you like most. You’ll roughly need per person:
- Pasta (Penne)
- Green Beans (a small handful)
- Sugar Snaps (a small handful)
- Cocktail tomatoes (around 5, or more)
- Cream Cheese, around 50-100g
- 1 clove of garlic (or more)
- Salt, Pepper
- In case you fancy cheese, you may want to add some parmesan as well.
And then: improvise, improvise!
Here’s roughly how I did it:
I cooked some Pasta (Penne) al dente. Meanwhile, I cut green beans to the length of the Penne (for the looks), cooked them in water for ~7 mins, set them aside. I washed the sugar snaps and cut the cocktail tomatoes in halfs, and set them all aside as well. And I cut the garlic in very very tiny dices.
When the pasta was done, I left some water in the pot, added the cream cheese and garlic, some pepper and salt, stirred it all, had it cook a little more until the sauce was thickening, added all veggies and served it with the salad.
I liked this dish a lot. It doesn’t require a lot of special stuff, tastes very fresh, it’s also a little creamy, and has a lot of veggies in it.
And hey, just in case you think you could like this dish also – here’s a crappy photo I took last night right before eating it:
