grilled vegetable pasta

One thing I don't get a whole lot of in Beijing is pasta - vegan pasta is difficult to come by in restaurants (though Veggie Table has a couple on the menu that I'd like to sample), and it can be hard to purchase dried pasta. A lot of the really big supermarkets stock a little, though, if they have a 'foreign' section, and of course there are my semi-regular visits to April Gourmet (a Western supermarket near my Chinese school).

Craving pasta, I recently put together this from things mostly picked up at April Gourmet: spirals, a tin of tomatoes, and a small takeaway container of grilled vegetables. It's pricy for a home-cooked meal (about 17Y for the pack of pasta, 15Y for the tomatoes, and 22Y for the veggies), but it was exactly what I wanted. Sometimes a little pasta when you're far away from home is what you really want.




grilled vegetable pasta

Super simple! Set enough pasta for two people on to boil. Slice half a spanish onion, and fry in a little olive oil. When it's softened, add some dried oregano and a little dried chilli, a minced garlic clove, and quickly follow it up with a tin of tomatoes, and leave to simmer for five minutes. Then add all your grilled vegetables, heat through, stir through some nutritional yeast, mix it through with the pasta and serve it all up.

It was worth it to cart that packet of nutritional yeast flakes all the way from Melbourne.