[Each week at ProfHacker, Billie Hara (and friends) offer "What's for Lunch?"—health-conscious recipe suggestions and a discussion space for readers to pick up some tips and share their own. At ProfHacker, we recognize that sometimes lunch is a lifehack.—Ed.]
This is the perfect dish for those times when you haven’t gone to the grocery store in a while but you need to put something together for dinner. Depending on what kind of pantry you keep, these ingredients are likely to be available to you at all times. Add a simple salad and you’ll have a nice meal on the table in no time. And if you use a short pasta like penne, fusilli, or farfalle, you’ll find that this dish packs up nicely as leftovers for lunch on campus. (Long pasta like spaghetti, linguine, or fettucine doesn’t really work so well for such purposes, in my experience.)
Ingredients
- 1 pound of penne pasta
- 2 tablespoons of olive oil
- 4 cloves of garlic, minced
- 1 28-oz can of diced tomatoes
- 1/2 cup of Kalamata olives, pitted and sliced
- 2 tablespoons of capers, drained
- 1 teaspoon dried oregano
- 1 teaspoon dried basil
- 1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper
- grated Parmesan cheese
Directions
In a large pot, heat the oil over medium heat and sauté the garlic for about a minute. Add the tomatos, olives, capers, oregano, basil, & red pepper, and — stirring occasionally — let simmer while you prepare the pasta.
Following the instructions on the package, cook the penne in a large pot of boiling salted water.
Drain the pasta and add it to the sauce. Serves 6. Top with a little grated Parmesan cheese, if you like.
What about you? Do you have any favorite, easy pasta dishes?
[Creative Commons-licensed flickr photo by dboy]
Follow Profhacker through your favorite RSS reader: 
2 Responses to What’s for Dinner? Pasta Puttanesca!
amandafrench - August 4, 2010 at 10:04 am
Oh, but what’s a puttanesca without anchovies?!? And as far your question about favorite easy pasta dishes, I often make “clean out the fridge pasta.” The recipe for which is olive oil, garlic, penne or other pasta (I totally agree about short noodles being better for leftovers), plus all the vegetables and meat and cheese in the fridge that’ll spoil soon if I don’t use it. One of the best pasta dishes I ever made was made that way, with chicken, zucchini, kalamata olives, and blue cheese, as I recall. Seasonings can range from black pepper to basil to red pepper. It’s also good to keep jars of marinated things around for such recipes: olives, capers, artichoke hearts, banana peppers.
george_h_williams - August 4, 2010 at 11:23 am
@amandafrench: Good point about anchovies, but I figured most people would not usually have anchovies — or anchovy paste, which would also workd — on hand. (And while I love anchovies, I recognize that many, perhaps most, people do not.)I’m pretty sure that puttanesca’s origins are as a “clean out the fridge” pasta dish, so you’re definitely cooking with the right spirit!