pepper pasta

Here's a quick meal idea: make a ragu out of peppers, onions, and mushrooms and add it to pasta sauce and angel hair spaghetti. I recommend using those baby bell peppers that are colorful and come in a little plastic container. They are really sweet and add a good contrast to the acidity of the sauce. Another idea is to go to the farmer's market and experiment with different peppers. At our farmer's market, there are these odd looking Italian peppers that work well in this dish. Here are a couple of tips for trimming calories:

1. Do not saute the veggies in butter. Instead, create a thin coating of pasta sauce on the bottom of a frying pan, and saute them in the pasta sauce. Add in some garlic powder and crushed red peppers for flavor and heat.
2. Do a 1 to 1 ratio of pasta to veggies. In other words, cook a cup (or more) of mixed veggies to serve with a cup of pasta.

For more ideas like this, I highly recommend getting this book: The Complete Book of Pasta and Noodles. It is from the writers of Cook's Illustrated, which is where I get a lot of my cooking ideas. I have not made a single bad dish from this book. It has everything from homemade pastas to a quick Pho recipe, which tastes surprisingly close to the real thing. Plus it has a lot of good and flavorful ways to incorporate veggies into pastas.

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