Description:  Bruschetta in pasta. Fresh, light, and filled with flavour. You can serve hot or cold. Alongside a glass of white wine would be my favorite to share with a friend. It can be either a main dish or a side dish if you use different types of pasta such as farfalle.
Serves: 2
Cooking time: 25 minutes

Ingredients

• Spaghetti – 180g
• Extra virgin olive oil – 2 tablespoons
• Tomatoes – chopped in small dice, 2 pieces or 120g
• Garlic – 3 cloves crushed
• Basil leaves – Torn 20 leaves or 5g
• Onion – thinly sliced, half of small size or 20g
• Black pepper – ground, ½ teaspoon
• Prosciutto di parma – cut in 4 or 5 pieces, 2 slices

Method

1. Follow package instructions to cook spaghetti pasta to al dente in plenty of boiling water with salt.
2. While waiting for the pasta to be ready, in a bowl, mix tomatoes, basil leaves, 1 clove of crushed garlic, and ground black pepper with 1 tablespoon of olive oil.
3. When the pasta is ready, drain the cooking water. Add 1 tablespoon of the extra virgin olive oil and 2 cloves of garlic in the pot which you used for boiling pasta. Use low heat for 30 seconds, stirring regularly.
4. Put the pasta back into the pot and toss to coat thoroughly.
5. Serve spaghetti first and put the tomato-basil mixture on top of the pasta. Then add the sliced prosciutto and sliced onion.

To serve: ground black pepper and salt if needed.

Nutritional Values Per Serving

Kcal	Protein	Fat	Carbs	Fibre	Sugars	Salt	Saturated Fat	Vitamin C
495.3	15.7g	17.7g	71.1g	4.4g	3.7g	0.6g	0.3g	10.8mg
24.8%	31.4%	25.2%	27.3%	14.6%	4.1%	10.1%	1.7%	27.0%

Nutritional Tips

I personally think that this is one of the healthiest pasta recipes compared to other cheesy or fatty sauce-based pasta. When you make the tomato mix with olive oil, the juices will come out and create a thin tomato olive oil sauce with basil and garlic flavour. It sounds plain but it gives you quite a punch. Adding salt before eating is not too bad as more than 80% of the sodium intake comes from processed food such as ham, cheese, or even ready-prepared meals. This is because sodium is widely used in the industry as a preservative, a flavour enhancer (MSG – monosodium glutamate) or in baking powder (bicarbonate).

Tomatoes are low in fat, high in fibre, vitamin C, and are a good source of potassium. They also contain some vitamins B1, B2, B6, folates, essential minerals (iron, calcium), and no cholesterol, all while being really low in calories with 18 kcal per 100g. On top of this, tomatoes are very versatile, so you can add them in so many different dishes.

“Lycopene” is one of the carotenes present and responsible for the red colour and it is a potent antioxidant. Some studies show that lycopene may decrease the risk of chronic diseases, such as some types of cancer and most notably prostate and cardiovascular diseases (Agarwal and Venketeshwer Rao. Canadian Medical Association Journal, 2000, 163(6), 739–744, Story et al, Annual Review of Food Science and Technology, 2010;1:189-210). So why not add tomatoes to your diet 🙂 ?