🍅🍝 🍅🍝🍅🍝 🍅🍝🍅🍝 🍅🍝🍅🍝 🍅🍝🍅🍝 🍅🍝🍅🍝 🍅🍝🍅🍝 🍅🍝🍅🍝 🍅🍝
During a recent visit to my local Turkish grocery store, I stumbled upon these beautiful red beef tomatoes that sparked an idea to create a roasted vegetable roast pasta sauce, with a lemony twist. This recipe takes minimal preparation time and most of the cooking is done in the oven.
Vegetables as a starting point
For this recipe, I chose the freshest and most colourful vegetables I could find, mostly within the red category. This means that the sauce has maximum flavour and a brilliant red colour. Mixing red and green vegetables into a pasta sauce (or sauce) means that the colour will tend towards brown, rather than red. All the flavours in the vegetables are enhanced by the roasting stage, bringing out the sugars in the vegetables as it darkens.
The Secret Ingredient: Roasted Lemon
The punch of flavour in this sauce is the lemon, which is roasted with the vegetables and blended into the sauce, Yes, the entire lemon. I like to use a small-ish lemon for this and the key is that it needs to be a lemon with a thin and soft peel. Lemons with a thick rind will likely leave too bitter a taste in the sauce.
The transformative power of the roasted lemon truly complements the rest of the roasted vegetables and takes a typical vegetable pasta to an unusual place.
The Easy Preparation Process
The ease of the recipe is from the fact that it requires only 5 vegetables (a lemon, tomatoes, carrots, onions and garlic) to be very roughly chopped, approximately in quarters or large chunks, and then roasted in the oven smothered in olive oil, salt, pepper, za’atar and a few chilli flakes.
Use a large enough roasting pan for this so that the vegetables are not stacked on top of each other, but rather are laying flat in a single layer. This allows the heat to reach every piece of vegetable evenly and allows them to roast instead of steam.
To finish the sauce, all that needs to be done is to put everything into a blender with a bit of pasta water until you get a smooth sauce. Easy as that!
A Sauce for All Seasons
This recipe can easily be adapted to suit the season. For example, in the autumn, pumpkin or butternut squash would be perfect in this. Red pepper would also work well. Pairing the sauce with orzo pasta in the winter will make it extra warming and cosy, whilst linguine in summer would be fresher and lighter.
Easy Summer Dinners Made Perfectly
I like to serve this pasta with a fresh green salad and some chilli sauce on the side if you like it spicy. A topping of freshly chopped flat-leaf parsley or fresh basil would work well here and always a generous sprinkle of Parmesan cheese.
This recipe is the perfect way to embrace the versatility of roasted vegetables and elevate it with a surprising addition of roasted lemon. This is one recipe that is sure to become a staple in your kitchen.
Vegetable Roast PastaSauce
Equipment
- Food processor
Ingredients
- 3 tbsp olive oil
- 3 beef tomatoes
- 2 small yellow onions
- 4 carrots
- 1 medium lemon (including the skin)
- 5 cloves garlic
- 2 tsp Za’tar
- ¼ tsp chili flakes (or to taste)
- salt and pepper
- Parmesan cheese
Instructions
- Turn on your oven to 180 degrees Celcius (350 degrees Fahrenheit). To begin, roughly quarter the beef tomatoes, onions, carrots, lemon (including the skin), and garlic, creating bite-sized chunks.
- Place all the vegetables into an oven dish and generously coat it with olive oil, salt, Za'tar, and chili flakes. Mix the vegetables until they are fully coated in the olive oil and seasonings.
- Place the oven dish filled with vegetables into the oven. Roast for 45 minutes to an hour until all the vegetables are tender and golden brown.
- Once the vegetables are almost done. Cook the pasta, reserving about a cup of the cooking liquid. Now, it was time to bring everything together. Carefully transfer the roasted vegetables to a blender or food processor, along with about half the reserved pasta water and blend with a few swift pulses until you get a velvety and creamy sauce.
- Combine the pasta and the sauce into a pot and mix together. If you need additional pasta water at this stage, feel free to add it. Finish with freshly grated Parmesan cheese.
