Lemon and mint spaghetti with crispy bacon: A quick and tasty family supper that’s ready in 15 minutes.
I’m delighted to be hosting February’s round of Pasta Please on behalf of Jac from veggie-tastic Tinned Tomatoes.
If you’re a vegetarian you should really check out Jac’s amazing blog, as she has SO many delicious recipes. And let me tell you her veggie burger selection is something to be admired 🙂
So, yes, pasta! I’d like all you bloggers out there to get thinking about yummy things to do with spaghetti! My kids adore spaghetti, probably because it’s the most fun and messy of all the pasta types. But what do you cook it with? Is it a classic bolognese, or do you whizz up a fresh pesto in your blender? Maybe you keep it simple and just stir a bit of olive oil and grated parmesan through it.
Please come and share your spaghetti recipe posts with us using the linky below. And to kick proceedings off I’ve come up with a super-quick and fresh recipe:
Lemon and leek spaghetti with mint and crispy bacon
serves 4
prep time: 5 mins
cooking time: 15 mins
INGREDIENTS
100g streaky bacon (or veggie bacon)
olive oil/butter
1 leek, chopped
1 lemon, zest only
1 mugful of frozen peas
100g cream cheese
300g spaghetti
Handful fresh mint, leaves picked and finely chopped
METHOD
1. Grill or griddle the streaky bacon until crispy, drain on some kitchen paper then snip into small pieces and set aside.
2. Soften the leek in a little olive oil or butter for around 5 minutes, add the lemon zest, frozen peas and cream cheese, season with black pepper and stir over a low heat for a further 5 mins until the cream cheese melts into a lovely sauce with the other ingredients.
3. Meanwhile bring a large pan of water to the boil and cook your spaghetti until just tender, drain retaining a little of the cooking water and turn into a large dish and toss with the sauce. Scatter with the crispy bacon pieces and chopped mint and serve immediately.
Tip: If you prefer you could soften the leeks and bacon (chopped) together, but I do mine separately as I like the bacon crispy and also I’m cooking for a vegetarian and this means he can have the saucy spaghetti minus the bacon.
Pasta Please Challenge: February
Guidelines:
- To join in, make a pasta dish using spaghetti
- All diets welcome – vegetarian, meat-eaters, etc
- Post your pasta dish on your blog and add it to the linky at the bottom of the current challenge.
- Link to Feeding Boys and Tinned Tomatoes
- Use the Pasta Please logo in your post
- If you use twitter, tweet your post with @cookingkt and @tinnedtoms with hashtag #PastaPlease and we will re-tweet it.
- Only one entry per blog.
- Recipes must be added to the linky by the 28th of each month.
If you’re looking for further inspiration here are some of my other spaghetti recipes:
- Spaghetti bolognese bake – photograph by Sharron Gibson
Lovely recipe except the meaty bit for me of course but I imagine this would work just as well with just the leeks, lemon and mint. It’s such a sunny recipe too. Perfect for this really rather depressing weather.
It works perfectly without the bacon. I did it with veggie bacon for Matthew 🙂
Lovely! I will think of some ideas. Will you accept noodles? After all they are pasta really.
Love the idea of lemon and leek – I love both. I always add leek to my macaroni cheese, a spot of lemon zest will be added next time, too. This looks like a super-tasty supper. I’m having a ‘free-from’ February so I’ll be grabbing some gluten-free spaghetti from the Italian deli and look forward to joining in with your challenge x
Thanks Ren, yes I find a zest of lemon improves loads of my recipes 🙂 Free-from February sounds like a challenge… is that just gluten free or other things too?
Thanks for hosting Katie, I have added it to The Food Blog Diary.
Thanks Jac – looking forward to seeing all the tasty entries 🙂
Quite excited to be the first recipe on the linky! Thanks for hosting. Your lemon and leek spaghetti looks yum, but no bacon in this house… 🙂
Thanks so much for linking up Helen, bacon is a luxury in our house as my husband is a vegetarian, so I try not to cook it too often as it feels unfair it smells so amazing. Mind you, quorn bacon isn’t bad!