Avocado Pasta Recipe

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Hello and welcome to Freshly Served the healthy vegan cooking show. I’m Heather and tonight were gonna make an avocado pasta.

And for the pasta I’m using some Kamut penne and Kamut is a grain much like wheat or spelt but anyway it’s a whole grain and I’ve got some water boiling here. I’m going to put just a pinch of salt in the water. Hmm, like that and pour this pasta in.

The reason for the water being salted is to help the cooking process of the pasta not for boiling or anything like that.

Ok, so leave that and then were gonna move on to what were going to dress this pasta in which is always the most exciting part. In the summer I like to use lemons. So I got this gigantic lemon here and I’m going to zest it.

And whenever I’m zesting lemons I like to make sure, I mean I always buy organic produce but if I’m zesting something in particular I want it to be organic because the skin is where the chemicals will stick. Make sense right?

When they’re spraying pesticides it’s going to hit the skin so if you’re peeling the skin off of the lemons I’m really just can’t bring myself to buy a non organic one.

So get the zest off and I am a big fan of zest so I’m gonna use all of these and then what I do is cut the lemon in half then I get my little strainer, put it over the bowl and this bowl is a little bit too big. I’ve chosen a bowl that’s big enough to fit the pasta inside it because then I don’t have to have two different bowls, one for the sauce and one for the pasta.

So, I’ll just stick this strainer at the bottom of the bowl and what I do is stick my zester into the lemon to get all the juice out and like I said this is one gigantic lemon so it’s gonna have a lot of juice in here which I like.

But if you’re not so big on lemon what you can do is either choose as smaller lemon, most of them aren’t this big or if you do have one this big you can just use half so cut down on the lemon juice and you can add some water or some orange juice maybe a little bit sweeter, a little less tart. I love lemon; I could eat them just on their own.

Check out how much juice came out of that lemon that is awesome! So into the bowl with the lemon juice I’m going to press some garlic and I like to press the garlic in my press when I’m using it raw because otherwise it can get a little bit too intense so squeeze it right out and then just scrape all that out.

Now whole grain pastas do tends to stick a little bit so make sure you give it a stir every so often. Sometimes it stick on the bottom, sometimes it stick to each other but if you stir them, they will be just fine.

And the next I’m gonna add into the bowl with the lemon and the garlic is some fresh mint that I’m gonna chopped up as well as some green onion. Green onion or chives both are beautiful in this. I’d probably prefer chives but I ran out, so green onion it is.

The pasta is done and you can test that by just taking a piece out and tasting it. Simply choose and al dente is how I like it which is just a little bit on the firm side, my dad likes it very very cooked.

And you know stickers on the bottom just scrape them off and then put in some water right in the pot, it will lift them up really easily and then it will be fine.

Ok, give it a little toss to get any extra water off with penne because they’re these tubes of pasta. They can sometimes hide water inside, never nice when you take a bite of pasta and there’s like boiling water in there just waiting to burn your tongue.

Ok, dump that into the bowl with the lemon, the mint and the green onions or the chives. Give it a toss around and then were gonna season this with some sea salt and I’ve put dry kelp into my salt shaker so that it decreases the amount of salt that I have come out but it keeps the salty flavor from the kelp.

Some black pepper I’m not gonna need too much on this one and some nutritional yeast which if you don’t have it, it’s not absolutely necessary but let me tell you, it adds a lot of flavour. So if you find some, try it. Throw it in. It’s really good. It tastes a little bit cheesy.

Some people – ok, it’s called nutritional yeast because some people say it has a lot of nutrients in it and I’m sure it does but they haven’t been able to figure out if we can actually use the nutrients from the nutritional yeasts and it depends from the quality of the nutritional yeast that you get so when I use it, it’s mostly for flavour. If there are nutrients in there then that’s just a bonus.

Ok, so that is all ready to go and then what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna take an avocado and slice it up. We can put it on top. When you look for an avocado it should be brown on the outside, if it’s green it’s not yet ripe, you’ll have to leave it to ripen for about a week.

If you press the skin, it should be a little bit soft, not too soft. You shouldn’t be able to like stick your finger right down into the pith. But soft enough that you know it’s ripe. So what you do to cut an avocado is you slice all the way around and then turn and it should open like so.

The pith will stay on one side and the other side will be empty. When the pith is brown like this that’s when you know it’s perfectly ripe because there’s nothing stuck to it. To get the pith out simply whack it with your knife, give it a twist and it will come off like that.

Then to get the skin off, slice it into quarters. Avocado likes to stick to your knife and then just peel the skin off.

The last thing I’m going to add to this pasta is a whole bunch of sprouts that Phil has grown in a jar here. They add a huge amount of nutrition because they are the point at which the plant is coming out of the seed, it has a ton of nutrients; it’s high in protein relative to its weight.

They don’t weigh very much and it just really packs a huge nutritional punch so toss a bit in there. I’ve got a lot because I like a lot but start small.

And to serve I’m just gonna lay a few slices of my avocado on top here and sometimes people are afraid to eat avocado because it is fairly high in fat but the type of fat that is in avocado is monounsaturated which is shown to be beneficial for cholesterol and you’ll notice that I didn’t use any oil in this recipe I’m just gonna get a little bit of ground pepper on there. The best source of fat is whole food like avocado rather than oil.

The fresher the food the better so get dose of some essential fat in your diet with some avocado on to lovely lemon pasta. You can find the recipe at HealthyVeganRecipes.net. I’m heather and this is Freshly Served.