Meatless Monday

Have you heard of Meatless Monday? It's a campaign to cut meat out of your diet 1 day a week in an effort to improve personal health and the health of the planet. At first, I thought that it would be difficult to cut out meat, but there are a lot of recipes that make it easy. You can learn more about Meatless Monday here.

Here's my go-to recipe for a simple, fresh family dinner. It's so easy and tastes great with fresh ingredients from the Farmer's Market.


Fresh Tomato and Basil Pasta
Ingredients
1 (16 ounce) package of pasta (I love Barilla’s Campanelle shaped pasta!)
1 cup diced tomatoes
1/2 cup olive oil
1 tablespoon minced garlic
Fresh basil, cut into small strips
1 tsp Italian seasoning seasoning

Salt & fresh ground pepper (to taste)
Fresh grated Paremsan cheese (to taste)
Asiago cheese (to taste)

Directions
1. Cook the pasta in a large pot of boiling salted water until al dente.

2. Heat the tomatoes, olive oil, garlic, and Italian seasoning in a warm skillet. No need to COOK the items, you’re just warming them!

3. Drain the pasta and then toss the hot pasta with the ingredients in the skillet.

4. Lightly pan fry the entire mixture in a large skillet with some additional olive oil for 2-3 minutes.

5. Remove from the heat.

6. Add in basil; mix to combine, then season with salt and pepper.

7. Serve with grated Parmesan and Asiago cheese.

Of course, you could add other ingredients to this such as eggplant or squash and it would be delicious. Let me know what you think when you try it. I'm constantly tweaking my recipes to improve them. Have you tried Meatless Monday?

xoxo