6 ingredient creamy broccoli pasta with lemon, garlic and parmesan

A surprisingly delicious Italian classic!

You know what my favourite kind of cooking is? It’s those times when you look in the fridge and you think there’s nothing in there aside from an abandoned broccoli and a forgotten lemon and yet from seemingly nothing you create something truly sensational. Like your own personal version of the cooking show Ready Steady Cook. There is nothing more satisfying to me. In our house we call it a Fridge Forage and it’s so often that the most delicious meals come from the result of a Fridge Forage.

I love this kind of cooking because it forces you out of your comfort zone and you really have to be creative. The same way I love when people send me messages and say I loved this recipe but I didn’t have x at home so I used y instead and it worked perfectly - I LOVE that!

I never want a recipe to stress you out if you don’t have the exact ingredients, it’s often about taking the recipe as a base, seeing what you’ve got and then making it your own. But I can also promise that this kind of cooking comes with practice, cooking is all about practice. No one starts as a good cook, you have to try, and fail (sometimes edibly, sometimes not) and keep trying again until you’ve done enough to know what might work, what flavours might go together and what probably won’t work. Confidence is the key to good cooking and that really only comes with practice, so don’t worry if you’re not in your era of being able to take a recipe and adapt it just yet, that’s why I’m here!

Now onto today’s recipe, pasta is such a perfect weekday dish, it seems very fitting for Dinner Tonight and if you’ve had broccoli pasta before I know I don’t need to tell you how delicious it is. If you haven’t…well I get it. Truly I do! It doesn’t sound the most alluring of pasta dishes but don’t judge a book by a cover. Or a pasta by it’s name etc. But let me tell you that this dish is warm, comforting, fresh, creamy, rich and light all at the same time. I know, that should all be a weird contradiction but honestly broccoli pasta is a staple in lots of Italian households and for good reason. It’s so simple and so delicious and the best way to use up that lonely broccoli you find lurking in your fridge. I always have pasta of some kind or another in my kitchen cupboard, and I always have a hunk of parmesan in the fridge so this pasta is a staple in my house for it’s pure ease.

The first time I made it, it completely surprised me. I’ve never seen it on a menu in a restaurant but it’s the kind of dish that’s cooked in home kitchens in Italy. And that’s actually exactly the kind of food I really want to eat in restaurant - but I think restaurants often think they have to be really complicated but for the most part we just want good food cooked simply, we don’t crave cheffy tricks, we just want the kind of food a brilliant grandmother might cook. And that we haven’t had to cook. Don’t we?

If you haven’t tried it before, give it a go and let me know what you think! I’ve also started including PDF’s of the recipes so it’s easy to download the Dinner Tonight recipes and print them off for reference.

Here’s what you need: