Description: Can be served hot or cold. Vegetarian pasta.
Serves: 2
Cooking time: 15 minutes

Ingredients 

• Spaghetti – 180g
• Cherry tomatoes – 8 pieces or 50g
• Garlic – pureed, 2 cloves
• Extra Virgin olive oil – 2 tablespoons
• Mushrooms – sliced, 160g
• Lemon – squeezed, 1 piece
• Ground black pepper – 1/2 dash
• Salt – 1 dash
• Fresh parsley -1 tablespoon

Method

1. Follow the package instructions to cook the pasta to al dente in plenty of boiling water with salt.
2. When the pasta is almost cooked, heat the olive oil in a large non-stick frying pan and cook the mushrooms over medium heat.
3. Stir in the pasta, tomato, garlic, salt and black pepper, then cook for a couple of minutes. 

To serve: Sprinkle ground pepper, parsley and squeeze lemon.

Nutritional values per serving

Kcal	Protein	Fat	Carbs	Fibre	Sugars	Salt	Saturated Fat	Vitamin B2
445.5	13.8g	13.0g	71.7g	4.2g	3.8g	0.2g	0.3g	0.4mg
22.3%	27.5%	18.5%	27.6%	14.1%	4.2%	3.6%	1.3%	36.6%

Nutritional Tips

Mushrooms are generally known to be plain. However, each mushroom has its own texture and a slightly different taste. In Japan, there are so many mushrooms including enoki, brown shimeji (buna-shimeji), white shimeji (bunapi), hon-shimeji, eringi, shiitake, maitake-mushrooms, oyster mushrooms (hiratake), nameko-mushrooms, Matsutake-mushrooms (this is the most expensive mushroom, like French caviar, one piece can cost 10,000 JPY or more)…

I personally think most mushrooms go well with pasta. Mushrooms can get smaller when cooked and when they are stored frozen. So having them in the freezer would be useful when you want to add mushrooms to your dishes. Once mushrooms are frozen, their texture would not be the same. This is possibly due to vegetables including mushrooms may not be re-hydrate back to pre-freezing status (van der Sman et al., 2013, Food Research International 54, p. 804 – 811. ). Therefore, adding them into soups, stew or sauce would be ideal.

Vitamin B2 (Riboflavin) cannot be stored in the body, so we need to take it from our diet daily. If deficiency occurs, cheilosis, magenta tongue or anaemia (secondary iron deficiency) can be seen. Riboflavin is also used as a food colouring (E101) due to its yellow-orange colour. Good sources of riboflavins are milk, meat, fish, liver and fortified breakfast cereals. Riboflavin is unstable under ultraviolet light, it is therefore important to keep these foods out of direct sunlight.