Pasta with tomatoes, goat cheese and olives

A super simple summer pasta recipe: few basic ingredients mixed together to obtain a super tasty and creamy dish.

Considering the acidity of the tomatoes this is a wonderful toddler recipe (starting form 12 months)

Tomatoes are finally back at the farmer’s market, with tons of different varieties. For this recipe I picked up super sweet and colored cherry tomatoes, the sweeter, the better. I also used a mix of black and green sweet olives.

My kids are very suspect about olives. When I offer them the full olive to snack with they always refuse it. But if I finely mince the olive and use it as an ingredient for my recipes, they love them 🙂 Same thing for anchovies and capers. Sometimes is not the taste that kids refuse, but the texture or shape. Just changing it makes them enjoying a wider variety of foods.

For this recipe I finely minced the olives, the garlic and the onion. If you are cooking for very picky toddlers you can always mix everything creating a smooth paste.

Same suggestion for the tomatoes: I roughly chopped them in big pieces leaving the peel. For picky eaters I would suggest to cook the tomatoes like directed in the recipe, add all the ingredients and puree’ everything in order to obtain a smooth cream where your picky toddler will not be able to distinguish the single ingredients.

To give and extra touch of creaminess and taste to the recipe I used goat cheese. Did you know that goat cheese is very easy to digest? The reason is in the protein structure of the goat milk, totally different from other animals’ milk. The fat globules are very small and they do not separate but they stay suspended in the milk: this makes the milk easier for humans (and kids!!!) to digest.

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Pasta with tomatoes, goat cheese and olives

Ingredients

• 1 lb. sweet cherry tomatoes 450gr.
• 1 lb. spaghetti 450gr.
• 1/2 Cup black and green sweet olives 100gr.
• 3 Tbsp goat cheese
• 1 clove garlic
• 1/2 onion
• 4 basil leaves
• 3 Tbsp Extra Virgin Olive Oil
• pinch of salt
• 1 Tbsp sea salt for cooking the pasta

Instructions

1. Chop the cherry tomatoes in pieces
2. Finely mince the olives, the garlic and the onion
3. In a medium size frying pan add the Extra Virgin Oil of olive, the garlic and the onion. Turn the heat on at medium and sauté for 2/3 minutes
4. Add the tomatoes, adjust with a pinch of salt, stir and cook at low heat for 5 minutes.
5. Add the olives and the goat cheese, stir and turn the heat off.
6. Add few leaves of fresh basil.
7. Cook the pasta in abundant salted boiling water (add 1 Tbsp of sea salt when the water is boiling) following the cooking time on the pasta packaging.
8. Drain the pasta and add it to the sauce. Mix well and serve warm.
9. Enjoy!!