Devious Penne!

In my family, I am the only one who can eat any kind of vegetable and I feel happy when I see different colors in my food. Vegetables are so colorful, right? You have the greens, the reds, the yellows, the oranges, the purples- the variety is just huge. In addition, I simply love to incorporate nice bite size chunks of veggies, not too overdone, nice and crunchy........yeah, you get the idea! The other three here, however, are not too crazy about all the variety out there--- they are fine with the basics- you know, the potatoes, tomatoes, onions, peas and carrots, perhaps cauliflower and maybe spinach.......but that's it. I mean, they don't even like red bell pepper!

And so I came up with this devious trick in order to get them to eat red bell pepper. I made an excellent pesto using red bell pepper and other ingredients and poured it over some penne pasta mixed with some sauteed yellow squash. It turned out beautiful.

The Ingredients:

1 Red Bell Pepper (cleverly sneaked in by yours truly), a couple green onions, a little bit of fresh basil, a little bit of fresh cilantro, 1 jalapeno, 1 juicy tomato, a couple cloves of garlic, a small handful of almonds, lemon juice, salt to taste and some black pepper.

Can you pick out the red bell pepper from the tomato? ;)

The Pesto:

OK, this is no rocket science at all. I put all those above mentioned ingredients into the food processor and converted them into one rocking pesto. I had to add a little extra water to get it into a pourable state, else it was too thick. I tasted it- it was perfect with all the right flavors, sans the unnecessary oil (pesto, as you know, typically contains a good amount of olive oil.........).

My Rocking Pesto!

Meanwhile:

I cooked the penne pasta and while that was going, I cut up one nice yellow squash into bite size cubes and quickly sauteed it with some italian seasoning. The squash cooked up in no time at all!

Then:

I threw in the cooked penne onto the sauteed squash and then folded in that beautiful pesto. Drizzled a wee bit of olive oil* and it was ready to be eaten by the unsuspecting folk.

The Devious Penne! 

My devious trick actually worked! All three of them LOVED it. And I was once again, pleased with myself and my clever little trick.

*I learned from this guy on TV that olive oil is supposed to be a cold oil if you want all its benefits. Heating it up destroys its good properties. Ever since I have stopped using olive oil to actually cook food (I remember using olive oil to fry stuff!)--- I just drizzle it right at the end if needed.