I’m a student. As such, I eat a lot of pasta – if I  were honest, probably more than I should. I usually stand by tomato based sauces with tube shaped noodles, and I still maintain that that’s my favourite type of pasta dish, but somewhere along the line, I figured that I should consume some more green vegetables in my unhealthy pasta based student diet. You know, just to make sure I don’t get scurvy and die. Thus, this spinach and basil sauce with fettuccine. (Yes, I realize spinach isn’t high in vitamin C. Don’t call me out like that.)

I love food. But as I ranted about here, I can’t stand food elitism. Limiting food to what’s “traditional” feels ridiculous to me, and is placing unnecessary restrictions on food. It’s trying to make good food, something completely subjective, something that can be objectively measured. I’m not here for that. So I elected to ignore the so-called rules of pasta to make something I thought would taste good.

I cooked some garlic, onions, and mushrooms, then added some cream, Parmesan, basil, and spinach. I used fresh basil, but frozen spinach, because anyone that tells you have to cook with some specific thing and that if it’s not fresh, you might as well not bother is lying to you, and I wasn’t about to go to the store to get fresh spinach when I had some perfectly good frozen in my freezer.

I love mushrooms. I put them in everything. I chopped them up pretty roughly here so that I could taste them better in the finished sauce. I tossed it with fettuccine, and the end result was a rich, chunky sauce that clung to the noodles, and, if I say so myself, tasted delicious.

The original goal was to incorporate some more vegetables in my diet. I managed that much! Was it healthy? No, not even a little bit. But I tried something new, ate some spinach, and had a tasty meal. I even learned that I should absolutely not drop out of engineering to become a food photographer. Seems like a pretty productive experiment to me! Healthy can come later. One step at a time, right?