Sunblush tomatoes and spinach tagliatelle

Tonight I made sunblush tomatoes and spinach tagliatelle for dinner.  This is one of my favourite quick vegetarian meals and is a handy recipe to have up your sleeve for a busy midweek night. 

I chopped some of the tomatoes, spinach and pasta up into the chunks and feed it to the baby who devoured it!  I added a little cooled boiled water to it before giving it to him to help keep up his water intake.  He was not impressed when his was all gone and we ended up giving him some tagliatelle to feed himself while we were finished ours as he was looking at us with puppy dog eyes!

I paused long enough to take this photo of my tagliatelle before eating it!

Tip
I make my own sunblush tomatoes by roasting them in the oven.  Making your own will save a bit of money as shop bought ones can be quite expensive.  I also find that shop bought ones can be extremely oily.  If you are using shop bought ones in the recipe, put a spoonful of the oil into the pan before adding the tomatoes and frying.  Do not pour the whole lot into the pan straight from the tub!  My husband did this one night as I wasn't very direct in my instructions with regards to dealing with the tomatoes and the dinner was really greasy and not as pleasant to eat as it normally is.

When I make my own, I add a bit of extra flavour by adding some crushed garlic, dried basil and oregano, as well as olive oil to the tomatoes before putting them into the oven to roast.  As I had the oven on for dinner last night to cook the oven chips we had with the dinner last night I put the tomatoes into the oven at the same time so that the oven was on once.  After lifting out the chips, I put the oven up to gas mark 9 for five minutes and then turned it off, but left the tomatoes in the oven to continue roasting.  Once the oven was cooled I removed the tomatoes and put them into the into a tub and put them in the oven ready to use in the dinner tonight.

Ingredients - enough of each to serve the number of people you are cooking for.
Sunblush tomatoes - (I made my own with 1.5 punnets of cherry tomatoes)
Spinach, stalks removed (I used one small bag of baby spinach)
Tagliatelle (I used 6 nests of Dunnes tagliatelle)


Method

1. Put on the tagliatelle to cook according to instructions.  Before rinsing, remove a mug of water from the pasta pot.  Rinse the starch off with hot water from the kettle.
2. Heat the tomatoes in a frying pan and add the spinach.  Cook until the spinach has wilted.
3. Add tagliatelle to the frying pan and stir into the tomatoes and spinach.  Add a little of the water from the mug at a time to coat the pasta.  Serve.

Cost
I've estimated that the tagliatelle cost me €1, the tomatoes were €1.50 and the spinach was €1.49, making the total cost less €4 exactly.  In the past I have used spinach that I've grown myself to make this meal, meaning that it can cost me as little as €2.50.