To feed four pasta-packing diners, you will need:
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- 500g of green and white fettuccine
- 2 bunches of spring onions
- 5 green and red sweet peppers
- 4 cups of chopped rocket
- 5 cloves of garlic
- 1 cup of chopped basil
- 3 or 4 rounds of feta cheese
- Freshly ground black pepper
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- Salt to taste
- Extra virgin olive oil on demand
Careful readers will have noted the complete absence of meat. Do not adjust your Farmer’s Weekly; normal service will resume as soon as possible. But the question remains: is it possible to have a meal without meat? Of course it is – and there’s nothing stopping you from using this recipe as a side dish at a braai.
We begin. Using the flat of a heavy knife, partially crush each clove of garlic. This splits the skin, making peeling a cinch. Top and tail the sweet peppers, removing and discarding the pips. Remove the less-than- perfect leaves from the spring onions. Cut off the roots and chop the rest. Rinse and chop the rocket and fresh basil.
Preheat the oven to 200°C. When it’s ready, roast the sweet peppers for seven to 10 minutes, keeping an eye on the process to avoid burning. You want no more than a touch of the blast furnace to assist their culinary transformation. When done, remove and slice the peppers into 15mm sections and reserve for later. Now for the pasta. I usually buy green and white fettuccine for this dish; it looks good and enhances the Italian feel. But if you can only find the white variety, don’t worry: the taste is exactly the same.
Try to get everything ready at the same time, as this adds to the tasty freshness of the final result. To do this, you’ll need to run two processes – the boiling of the pasta and the construction of the sauce – in parallel. Start the pasta by adding it to lightly salted boiling water for the time indicated on the packet. You may wish to follow the ancient and scientifically unsupported belief that a tablespoon of olive oil added to the boiling water promotes the virtues of the final result.
You decide.
Pour 40ml of olive oil into a heavy-based frying pan and bring this up to medium heat. Sweat the spring onions and garlic for three minutes and then add the sections of lightly roasted sweet peppers for four minutes, followed by the rocket and basil for the final 60 seconds. Remove the pan from the heat.
Place the pasta into a serving bowl and pour the freshly made sauce over it. Stir well. Lightly crumble the feta into the mix by hand. Serve at once with salt and pepper for that final touch of customised seasoning.
Here’s one hell of a good meal!
