Olive Pasta Recipe (With Video)

This transcription will have some mistakes because it is partially automated.

Hello and welcome to Freshly Served, the healthy vegan cooking show. I’m Heather and tonight we are making a walnut olive pasta.

And I have been busy making a ton of soups for the February soup recipe product and so I’m actually gonna do this as a raw recipe but having a little bit too much cooked foods lately so I need to get just a light nice raw meal in me.

But you can very easily do this with cooked pasta as well or you can follow my directions and cook the vegetable pasta that I’m going to eat raw.

So we’ll get started with the pasta which I’m going to take a rutabaga which before I peel it looks like this and I’m going to spiralize it which makes it into long skinny noodles which then I’m gonna toss with an orange olive oil dressing, some olives and some walnuts. Very simple but it’s gonna be so delicious.

So let me show you first how to spiralize this rutabaga. So this is my spiralizer here. You can see it has a glass bowl at the bottom to catch the food, it’s got a blade and a slicer here to make the noodles and then it just presses down on the vegetable here and then I twist it with this.

I originally got this machine when Phil and I were eating all raw food and we did that because when you eat the food raw it keeps, you know most of the nutrients in it.

Now in the winter I do think that cooked food is good for you as well because the nutrients or the fibers and things get broken down so that the nutrients are more digestible by your body.

And I think a balance of cooked and raw is good especially in the winter your body wants to keep itself warm so it wants a little bit cooked foods. But every so often raw food is fantastic. It makes – it makes me feel really nice and light.

And I’ll just show you a close up there, that’s a rutabaga looks before its peel. It has kind of a purple top. It’s in the same family as the turnips so it looks lightly like that.

I like to use it for these noodles because it has a really nice dense texture but it has a very mild flavor. A lot of people use zucchini which I find a little bit too mushy and watery for my taste or they’ll use daikon radish which I find too radish like.

So this spiralizer a lot of people have troubled with it and the reason is because they don’t look into how they use it. So what you wanna do is get your vegetables sliced so that the edges are parallel.

See how my fingers are parallel on the edges, I’m gonna poke one at the bottom, put it right down there and then get the top stuck in there as well. Now you can only go and make this so long so if you really have a long daikon radish or carrot or something, you’ll have to cut it to this certain length.
But the key is to have the top and the bottom parallel otherwise it’s not gonna work properly and then all you do is spin it and I’ll just show you, you can see these beautiful noodles coming out the end.

So I’m gonna eat this raw, you can very easily if you have a spiralizer make the noodles and then cook them very lightly. You could steam them or you could boil them just for a few minutes or this recipe is also lovely if you have an - angel whole grain pasta or a rice pasta or something like that.

Definitely use a whole grain if you use a white pasta it has no nutrition left so please use whole grains that’s the only way to eat them healthy and I’m gonna enjoy my vegetable pasta.

So there is my finish spiralized rutabaga and if you are cooking a grain pasta then you’ll just cook it on its own and we’re gonna dump it right in the bowl. And I used two rutabagas there and you can see that i made quite a lot of noodles and actually these ones are really long, I usually chop this up a little bit before serving them.

I also have chopped up back here some olives. Olives in there fatty, salty deliciousness are gonna add quite a lot of flavor to this dish and I use the kind that have a pith because I haven’t been able to find a good olive that’s pithed.

They usually come with all kinds of preservatives when they come canned and I don’t know what they put in the ones that they sell in Deli so I’ve been buying jarred olives that have you know just olives and pickling liquid on the ingredients but if anyone has any ideas of a good source of olives I will be keen to know.

The other thing that I’m going to put in here are some walnuts, another nice fat and you can just crunch them up with your hands as you throw them in. Some of these are bigger than others.

And just add you know as many as you feel is necessary for your dish. Then what I’m going to do is make a dressing for this and what I’m gonna do for that is take an orange and the first thing I’m gonna do is get the zest off.

I never like t waste the zest I’ve said many times before but you can also grate the skin of the orange if you wish just don’t go pass the white part but a zester is only a few dollars if you go to your local thrift store you can probably fins one for a buck or two and they’re so handy and fun.

Then what I’m going to do is chop this orange in half. Oh! That’s a bit of a red orange. And then just shove my zester in there and squeeze the juice out. I’m squeezing it over a strainer so that I avoid having to chase after the seeds, just what I usually do.

I’m using this orange in the dressing in place of a vinegar because it’s a raw one ad I have a bit of vinegar lately and I wanted to do something a little bit sweeter and a little bit more mild.

It also will allow the olives and the walnuts to be the star of this dish rather than overwhelming my mouth with vinegar flavor. Once you get the juice out of your orange and you got the zest in there as well, you’re gonna add olive oil to finish off this dressing.

And what you’re gonna add is half as much orange juice as you have here so I haven’t given the specific measurements because some people are into different sizes than others. And if you use half as much olive oil as orange juice you will get a lovely dressing.

And then I’m just gonna add a pinch of salt to bring the two together otherwise they won’t really merge. They’ll just be olive oil and orange juice separated. Once that gets really bonded together them I’m just going to pour it over my pasta, don’t leave any zest behind, valuable stuff.

Then give it a toss, mix those all right in there, get the walnuts in there too. They tend to stick to the bottom of the bowl looking heavier and there you go! You got a beautiful pasta salad, lovely raw vegetable noodles or cooked whole grain pasta. Either is delicious.

I’m gonna serve that with some sunflower cheese that I made, if you want to see the recipe I made it also in the red wine lentil salad recipe. There you go! This would be great serve over some greens on its own, maybe with a soup, maybe with some bruschetta. Hmm, the possibilities are endless.

Thought I would show you my finish product with just a little bit of sunflower seed cheese on top and also I thought I would mention that this pasta salad is also excellent if you leave it to sit for a few hours and let the dressing sip into the pasta whether vegetable or grain. Either way if you let it sit for a little bit, delicious!