Fettuccine with Summer Veg and Goat Cheese

It is a happy day when Mike or I come home with a new Food Network magazine from the library. It's a pretty nice mag, and I generally get one or two recipes from it - skipping over most of the meat recipes (they really like variations of meat and potatoes). We needed a quick pasta dinner (okay, we just didn't feel like cooking) so we whipped up this pasta recipe.

I liked this recipe because the first step is just throwing a lot of raw veggies into a bowl. Would have made more sense to make it during the summer when we were saving our energy bill by not running the AC ever, but oh well. In went some sliced yellow squash, diced tomato (we just used red, didn't bother seeding it), some diced green onion, lemon zest (best!) and some olive oil.

Meanwhile we cooked up some whole-wheat spaghettini, throwing in a bunch of green beans for the last 2 minutes. Then came the fun part - mixing! We needed a slightly bigger bowl, since a few of the veggies went overboard, but oh well. We threw in the pasta and beans and tossed them with delicious goat cheese (the reason I chose the recipe - I found some affordably priced at my neighbourhood bulk store), reserved pasta water and some more olive oil. We then joked that this is the kind of simple recipe we shouldn't need a recipe to make.

Topped with grated parmesan cheese and more goat cheese, the pasta was ready to be devoured. Who can resist cheesy pasta? We don't often eat pasta without tomato sauce so this was a little different. It was quickly devoured while we watched our downloaded TV shows. Just another night with us!