This is a recipe from Gino’s Veg Italia. I’m not a big fan of Gino D’Acampo as a TV personality. He’s a bit in your face and bawdy for my liking, but I do like his recipes. I haven’t cooked a lot from this book but what I have cooked so far has all been very tasty and a bit different from your run of the mill recipes.
The original recipe uses passata but I’ve replaced that with a tin of tomatoes because the passata I can get comes in bigger sizes than I need and tinned tomatoes are cheaper! Also the black olives are my addition. For cooking I mainly use the cheap supermarket own brand pitted olives.
The fresh basil is really nice in this but if you haven’t got any, don’t worry, it’s still very tasty without.
You can serve this with any kind of pasta. The recipe in the book uses whole wheat fusilli (twists). When I made it today I used regular rigatoni (fat tubes).
Pasta with Yellow Pepper and Mascarpone Sauce
Ingredients
- 2 tbsp olive oil
- 1 red onion, peeled and finely sliced
- 1 yellow pepper, deseeded, quartered and sliced
- 400 g can of chopped tomatoes
- 50 g pitted black olives, sliced
- 10 fresh basil leaves plus extra for garnish
- 125 g mascarpone cheese
- pasta to serve (100g per person)
- vegetarian Italian hard cheese, grated, to serve (optional)
- black pepper
Instructions
- Heat the oil in a large frying pan over a medium heat.
- Add the red onion and yellow pepper and fry gently for 8 minutes to soften without colouring.
- In the meantime, put the pasta on to cook following the instructions on the packet.
- Add the tomatoes, olives and basil leaves to the frying pan. Mix well and simmer for about 5 minutes.
- Drain the pasta when it is cooked.
- Add the mascarpone into the mixture in the frying pan, stirring for a minute or two to combine.
- Season with black pepper and stir in the drained pasta.
- Serve with grated cheese and extra basil to garnish (optional).