I believe that good tasting food should be visually beautiful. Food is a form of art work. I take a lot of care with my dinner preparations, following what my mother taught me that if you have a lot of different colors on your plate then you will be getting a lot of different nutrients.

I made this dish and posted it a couple of weeks ago, but I’ve not been happy with the way the meal looked that night. It was far too bland and approached a monochromatic plate which makes the food about as appetizing as cardboard. (I know it has green and red in it but there is something lacking, perhaps with the pasta itself?)  So tonight I approached it with an artist’s eye, and feeling rich with a ‘fridge full of variety, I am offering this re-do.

Friends get impatient with me when I’m not able to provide exact quantities of ingredients when I’m making, for example, a stir fry, a soup, or perhaps this pasta dish. Tonight I set about to give every diner a plate full of vegetables, and all of it hidden in the pasta sauce.

These are the vegetables that I used for our family of six:

Vegetables included in this dish are: broccoli, kale, zucchini, carrots, tomatoes, onion, cauliflower and cauliflower greens.

When deciding on how much of each vegetable to use, I simply imagined how much I wanted each person at the table to have on their plate, then multiplied by six. Take a moment. Visualize your plate. Picture what colors,  flavors and shapes you are looking for, and then start chopping.

As an experiment, I took of 1/6 of each vegetable and put it in a Pyrex measuring cup just to see what we were all in for:

I think we all got a great assortment of vegetables on our pasta tonight, and I feel much better about the way the dish turned out this week. There is always room for improvement!