As delicious as pasta may be, it can still get a little boring if you don’t mix up your ingredients everyone once in a while. Sometimes, plain old spaghetti and marinara just won’t cut it — and that’s when you’re required to think outside of the box. Shake up your dinnertime routine by serving one of these 6 recipes — each featuring an atypical pasta dish ingredient — for dinner.
1. Pasta With Yogurt Sauce
This pasta dinner is a light, Middle Eastern-inspired change of pace. The recipe drapes a creamy yogurt sauce over your favorite pasta noodles. Best of all, it lends a creaminess to the dish without adding a high fat content to go along with it, and also provides your meal with a generous amount of protein, which will leave you feeling fuller for a longer time. This
dish from All Recipes takes about 30 minutes to complete and yields 6-8 servings.
Directions: Cook the pasta in a large pot of boiling salted water until al dente. Using a mortar and pestle, mash the salt and garlic cloves together into a paste. Warm the yogurt slightly in a sauce pan. Remove a small amount of warmed yogurt from the pan, and stir together with the garlic paste. Stir this mixture into the remaining yogurt.
Drain the pasta, and rinse in cold water. Place in a casserole or deep serving dish, toss with 1 tablespoon butter or margarine. Toss with half of the garlic-yogurt sauce. Spread the remaining sauce over the pasta. Garnish with the parsley.
For a very special dish, brown the pine nuts in 2 tablespoons butter or margarine. Pour over the parsley. Serve immediately.
Source: Thinkstock
2. Spaghetti With Strawberries
Fruit and pasta are rarely seen together, but the combination can provide your standard spaghetti dinner with an exciting twist. The recipe, which is posted on Pop Sugar and comes via the Manhattan restaurant Sfoglia, combines the sweetness of strawberries with the tartness of an aged balsamic vinegar to create a unique and complex dish. This recipe takes about 30 minutes to complete and yields 4 servings.
Ingredients:
1 pound good-quality dried spaghetti
4 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, plus more for finishing
1 pound ripe strawberries, cleaned and halved
2 tablespoons good aged (eight-year-old) balsamic vinegar
1 cup San Marzano tomato purée
4 ounces reserved pasta water
Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
Freshly grated parmesan, for serving (optional)
Directions: Cook the pasta in rapidly boiling salted water until al dente. In a large sauté pan, warm the olive oil and half of the strawberries over medium heat. Cook until the strawberries start to release juice. Add balsamic and reduce by half.
Add tomato purée, the rest of the strawberries, and the reserved pasta water, and reduce by half again until the sauce thickens. Season to taste. Toss with spaghetti. Finish with olive oil and black pepper.
Source: Thinkstock
3. Chocolate Pasta With Chocolate Hazelnut Cream Sauce, White Chocolate Shavings, and Fresh Berries
Up your pasta-making game with the incorporation of hazelnut, chocolate, and berry flavors to this dish made from scratch. This crunchy-creamy mix of sophisticated, slightly sweetened flavors creates a dish with unbeatable texture and character. This recipe from Cooking Channel TV takes about an hour and 5 minutes to complete to complete and yields 6 entrée-sized servings.
Ingredients:
Chocolate Pasta
2 ½ cups all-purpose flour, plus more if needed
¼ cup unsweetened cocoa powder, preferably Dutch-processed
¼ cup powdered sugar
Pinch salt
3 large eggs, beaten
1 tablespoon chocolate syrup
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Chocolate Hazelnut Cream Sauce
1 cup heavy cream
1 cup chocolate hazelnut spread, such as Nutella
1 pinch salt
2 pints raspberries, for garnish
Crème fraîche, for garnish
White chocolate shavings, for garnish
Chopped, skinless, toasted hazelnuts, for garnish
Directions: For the pasta, sift together the flour, cocoa, and sugar. Add a pinch salt and mound the flour mixture in a large bowl or on a clean work surface. Hollow out the center, making a well in the middle of the flour with steep sides. Break the eggs into the well. Add the chocolate syrup and vanilla. Gently mix together with a fork. Gradually start incorporating the flour by pulling in the flour from the sides of the well. As you incorporate more of the flour, the dough will start to take shape. Once it gets thick, you can use a spatula to incorporate the rest of the flour.
If the dough is too dry, add a little water. If the dough is too wet or sticky, add a little flour. Once the dough comes together, knead the dough on a clean work surface until it becomes smooth, about 8 minutes. Shape into a disc, cover with plastic wrap, and let rest in the fridge, 20 to 30 minutes.
Divide your rested dough into quarters and work with one piece at a time, covering your other pieces to keep them moist. Flour each piece lightly, shape it into a rectangular shape, and put it through a pasta sheeter attachment, starting at the widest setting. Run the dough once through the largest setting, fold it into thirds, and run it through one more time. Then run the pasta through the sheeting attachment once on every number, stopping at 5 or 6, depending on how thick you would like it. Lightly flour the rolled out pasta sheet and fold in half. Take your chef knife and cut ribbons about a ½-inch thick, then unravel the pasta ribbons and place on a floured baking sheet to keep from sticking.
For the sauce, bring the heavy cream to a simmer in a heavy-bottomed saucepan over medium-high heat and stir in the chocolate-hazelnut spread. Add a pinch salt and continue whisking until the sauce is creamy. Remove from the heat and reserve. Cook the chocolate pasta in a large pot of boiling water, 3 minutes. Immediately remove the pasta from the water and toss gently with the sauce and a little of the pasta cooking water to help with the consistency.
Mound the pasta and sauce on dessert plates and garnish with the fresh berries, a dollop of creme fraiche, white chocolate shavings, and skinless toasted chopped hazelnuts, to garnish.
Source: iStock