Rotini with Sun-dried tomatoes and Bell peppers

My kind of cooking on a weekday night would be to throw some in ingredients together and finish cooking in 30 minutes or less. Having a box of pasta around can be a life saver in such situations! This is one of those recipes. Nothing complicated or time consuming about this. When you pair ingredients that compliment each other well, you cant go wrong how ever simple your recipe is ! One of my recent favorite ingredient in pasta is sun dried tomatoes. Toss some sun dried tomatoes and some of the fragrant oil they have been soaking in, loads of garlic, some veggies of your choice, you end up with one tasty pasta. I have kept it simple with just green bell peppers here. Red, yellow bell pepper, broccoli, mushroom, zucchini make great additions to this pasta.

Ingredients:

• 2 cups uncooked pasta
• 1 big tomato
• 1 small onion finely chopped
• 1/4 cup sun-dried tomatoes chopped roughly
• 1 tbsp finely chopped garlic
• 1 small bell pepper cubed
• 1/2 tsp finely chopped basil leaves (or use dried Italian herbs)
• 1 tbsp olive oil (I used garlic and herbs infused olive oil)
• red chilli flakes for spiciness (optional)
• parmesan cheese grated

Method:

Boil water and cook pasta as per package instructions. Set aside 1/4 cup pasta water to be used in the sauce later.

In a pan, heat oil and add the garlic. Saute the garlic for a minute and add the chopped onions. Saute them until they become soft and transparent.

Puree the tomato and add the puree to the pan. Add the chilli flakes and saute until the sauce is cooked and the raw smell of the tomato is gone.

Add the chopped sun dried tomatoes alone with some of their oil, bell peppers and salt to the sauce and mix well. Saute them until the bell peppers is cooked. ( keep the bell peppers little crunchy).

Add 1/4 cup pasta water, cooked pasta, herbs and mix well.

Let it cook for a minute until everything is well combined. Serve hot with some grated parmesan.