Garden offerings – pasta and sauce in 12 minutes

I came home to my farm tonight after working in the city all week. We pushed open the gate at the bottom of the drive, meandered up the gravel road as a sunshower fell on the rich green paddocks, and I felt the weight of the world slide from my shoulders.

We hadn’t been home ten minutes when I realised something – I was starving!  A big call in a house with an empty fridge. I poked through the pantry. Spaghetti. But what to put with it? I figured I’d find something in the garden. Optimistically I placed a large cauldron of water on the stove, added a good measure of salt and left it to heat while I wandered up to the vegetable patch.

I filled the pocket of my apron with cherry tomatoes, some basil leaves and a few sprigs of parsley, a red chilli, and then stopped at the shed on the way back down the hill for some of the new garlic and onions I harvested a few weeks ago.

Dumping some pasta into the boiling water, I chopped a large onion roughly, and added it to a frypan with a good slug of olive oil and a knob of butter.  Then I poured myself a glass of red and allowed myself a contented sigh.

While the onion softened I dug through the back of the fridge and found the last rashers of smoky home-cured organic bacon, made by a farmer friend of mine, and a heel of parmesan. I chopped the bacon and threw it in the pan, and then crushed four fat garlic cloves, slivered the chilli, and added them as well. My kitchen filled with delicious aromas.  Madly I quartered the small cherry tomatoes and tossed them in, gave the pasta a stir, and then finely chopped the herbs.

With the pasta cooked I drained it, added the herbs to my big frypan and then tossed the spaghetti through the sauce, ready to be dressed with a little shaved parmesan.

Result: simple rustic pasta that took twelve minutes from idea to bowl. Verdict:  Delicious!