The simplest spaghetti dish you will ever make…
The simplest dishes are always the most complicated, don’t you feel? Ever since I started making spaghetti at home, this simplest spaghetti dish called Aglio Olio (read al-io ol-io – sounds odd for the Malayalam folks! 😉 ) has been on my agenda forever. I even tried it a couple of times, but with mixed results. It reminds me that I have to try making spaghetti with meatballs again, after a disastrous effort of having undercooked spaghetti and rubbery meatballs. Let’s not go into that… Hehe… Since this dish has a lot of parmesan cheese going in, I decided to feature it for the theme “Don’t be Cheesy” for the Blogging Marathon #139.
The beauty of this dish lies in its very limited ingredients. After melting butter or heating olive oil – or mixing both of them, like I did – the garlic is sizzled, and the rest of the ingredients are mildly sauteed. The cooked spaghetti is then added in tossed to coat well. Then it is left for a little time to play around with the flavors and settle in. Parmesan cheese is used in plenty and hence it turns out to be quite a heavy dish on your tummy. It is usually eaten with no meaty sides, so it is a very good “Meatless Monday” option, but of course, you could shallow fry chicken fillet with some spices to go along with it. My girls did want, but I didn’t give in. 😉 A word of warning is that this dish has to be had immediately after it is made. It tastes amazing when hot but as it gets cold, the parmesan sticks to it and creates a very unpleasant layer on the tongue. Off to this simple recipe…
Spaghetti Aglio Olio
Ingredients
- 200 gm spaghetti
- 2-4 tbsp olive oil
- 4-6 cloves garlic crushed
- 3-4 tbsp chopped parsley more for garnishing, refer notes
- 2 tbsp pine nuts
- 1 tbsp chilli flakes
- Salt and pepper to taste
- 1/4 cup grated parmesan cheese plus more for topping
Instructions
- Cook the spaghetti in hot salted water with a little olive oil till done. Drain and set aside. Reserve 1/2 cup of the pasta water.
- In a wok, heat the olive oil. Fry the garlic.
- Add the rest of the ingredients one after the other and give a good mix.
- Now add the spaghetti along with water as needed and toss to mix. Ensure that the mixture coats well on all the spaghetti.
- Cook on simmer for around 5 minutes.
- Add more parsley and parmesan cheese and enjoy it hot.
OMG your dish name as in malayalam got me laughing so hard!…seriously…however, this is so good yaar!
I agree simple dishes are always the difficult ones especially cooking spaghetti is the key thing here. A minute extra or two would make it clumpy. This is soo good and love the pictures. Super inviting.
This is comfort meal! Cooking pasta to the perfect texture makes it more enjoyable. Great recipe!