Garden Vegetable Pasta

There are lots of nice things to eat available in my garden at present, so I want to show you a recipe that I have put together, using a big selection of them.

This is what I had to begin with: Tenderstem Broccoli, tiny new Potatoes, Peas, Broad Beans, French Beans, baby Carrots, Kohlrabi, Tomatoes and a handful of various herbs (Mint, Oregano, Chives, Parsley).

My belief is that if you have good-quality ingredients you don't need to do much to them, so I kept my recipe very simple. I started by prepping the veg, cutting it into small pieces that would cook quickly.

I cooked some pasta, cooked the veggies, chopped the herbs, combined all the ingredients and mixed them together, using a small quantity of Olive oil to moisten the dish a bit, and then served it up. In order to provide a bit of protein I topped the dish with a couple of boiled eggs and some grated Parmesan cheese.

When cooking the veg, this was my method: I brought a big pan of water to the boil, and then put in the veggies successively, starting with the ones that take longest to cook and ending with the ones that cook very quickly. None of my veg needed a lot of cooking, but this is the order I chose: kohlrabi, baby carrots, broad beans, French beans, peas, broccoli. I didn't cook the tomatoes, I just added them afterwards as a garnish, and I cooked the potatoes separately since they do tend to produce a bit of unappetising scum which would spoil the look of the other stuff. The total cooking time was about 10 minutes, but this is something that you have to judge for yourself. More mature veggies generally take longer to cook than young ones.

Et voilà! You can't really get much simpler than that, but I have to say it was wonderful. I just love eating home-grown veg. It has so much more taste than stuff that has been hanging around in the shops for days on end.

For me the star of the show was the carrots, simply because I was just so glad to have been able to produce some nice carrots for a change - ones that the carrot-fly had not found. My ploy with growing the carrots in a container raised well above ground level appears to have paid off.