Its hard to believe we’re nearly one month in to spring and yet I’m encouraged to cuddle up on the sofa with a hot chocolate. Even though its cold outside it would be a shame to miss out on the lovely spring herbs and vegetables at our disposal. Most students can’t afford spring favourites like asparagus and fennel so I made this lovely (cheap) pasta dish to tantalise your taste buds.

To serve one you will need:

GF Fusilli (I’m not going to specify how much to cook because with pasta its always at your own discretion and dependent on how many people you’re cooking for and as you can see from my photo I like A LOT of pasta)

Juice of a quarter of a lemon

50ml of olive oil

Large handful of grated parmesan

two sprigs of tarragon chopped

handful of frozen peas

handful of mange tout

When I’ve cooked this dish for friends and family they’ve been very impressed but its one of the most simplest dishes to cook (with very little cooking required). Cook your pasta in boiling water and be very careful to stir it as much as possible because I find that GF pasta has a habit of sticking together more so than other pasta.

Whilst your pasta is cooking, in a bowl, cup or whatever you fancy, mix together your olive oil, parmesan, tarragon and lemon juice, grate a bit of zest in as well if you want. You need to make sure that the parmesan and oil ratio is enough to thicken the oil because you don’t want oil sitting at the bottom of your dish.

A few minutes before your pasta is cooked add your mange tout and frozen peas. You can use a variety of green veg in this dish, sometimes I would put spinach in my pasta bowl and then add the pasta, allowing the hot pasta to cook the spinach as I eat it.

Once the pasta and veg are cooked (and be sure to check your pasta because you know how long it takes to cook GF pasta), drain and put back in the pot. Add your sauce and mix round until the pasta is fully coated in the mixture. The great thing about this dish is you can adjust the ratio of the ingredients to your preference. So if you find you’ve added too much oil, you can grate over some parmesan in to the pot.

Simply serve your pasta, with some more parmesan on top and there you have it!

Before I was diagnosed I used fresh linguine for this dish and to me this is still the perfect pasta to use. I haven’t came across GF Linguine in shops but I highly recommend using it. The Fusilli worked well and the sauce coated the pasta but it just wasn’t the same.

There are so many great things about this dish, its quick, easy (apparently impressive) and you only have about three dishes to clean up after.

Channel spring with this brilliant dish (and fingers crossed the weather improves)

Dom x