Pasta and Roasted Vegetables

A recipe for Pasta with Roasted Cauliflower and Prosciuto was published on Simply Recipes, an excellent blog to which I subscribe. It looked delicious, and I modified it to a vegetarian dish with the vegetables I had on hand. We have made it three times now and it is already a favourite. The leftovers are excellent for lunch and are good cold or hot. I have copied the recipe from the other blog and have written in my changes.

Pasta with Roasted Cauliflower and Vegetables (Prosciutto) Recipe

If cherry tomatoes aren't available, you can skip them and add a few chopped sun dried tomatoes to the dish at the end.

Ingredients

• 1 medium cauliflower, cored and broken up into 3/4-inch florets (4+ cups)
• 1 pint cherry tomatoes (or sundried tomatoes in oil added at the end)
  
• Olive oil
• Salt
• Freshly ground black pepper
• 1 1/2 teaspoons dried sage
• 4 large cloves garlic
• (4 ounces of prosciutto) (mushrooms and red peppers used instead of meat)
  
• 8 ounces orecchiette pasta (or other pasta)
  
• 8-16 ounces baby arugula, collards, kale or spinach, cleaned and coarsely chopped
• 1 cup grated Parmesan cheese (I used less cheese than this)
  

Method

1 Preheat oven to 425°F. Lay out cauliflower, cherry tomatoes ( peppers, mushrooms etc in a roasting pan, sprinkle with olive oil, salt and pepper. Roast until just lightly browned and cooked through, about 15 minutes.
2 Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil (1 teaspoon salt for every quart of water).
3 While water is heating, slice garlic and greens. Once cauliflower has browned lightly, remove from oven, toss cauliflower with garlic and greens mixture, and return to oven to cook for 5-7 minutes more.
4 Boil pasta uncovered (rolling boil) for 9-10 minutes until firm, but done (al dente). Reserve one cup of pasta liquid. Drain water from pot. Add cauliflower, arugula (or spinach), sundried tomatoes and Parmesan to the pasta. Stir in enough cooking water to moisten. You likely will not need a full cup. Add salt and pepper to taste.
Serves 4.

Variation- I used an entire bunch of collards one day when I had no other greens. I sliced them thinly and roasted them with the cauliflower. The combination of greens was delicious!