Olivia Piepmeier

Pantry Spaghetti #1

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Wednesday, July 6, 2022
Categories: pasta pantry main
An illustration of a bowl of spaghetti. It's done in markers just outlining the bowl, a little flower design on the bowl, the noodles, and little squares representing bits of anchovies.

inspired by The Kitchn

Ingredients

  • 6 cloves garlic (or however many you want), minced
  • 6-12 ounce can/jar of black olives, drained & roughly chopped (it originally calls for 12 ounces, but I’ve never had that many on hand at once. 6 seems plenty but do whatever you want)
  • EVOO
  • red pepper flakes (to taste)
  • 1 pound spaghetti
  • 4 ounce tin of anchovies in oil (don’t drain them!)
  • salt, pepper, balsamic vinegar, parmesan (to taste)

Directions

  1. Start to bring a large pot of heavily salted water to a boil over high heat.
  2. Pour some of the anchovy oil in a small saucepan with a little bit of EVOO and warm over low heat for a few minutes. Add the garlic and your preferred amount of red pepper flakes and cook, stirring often, until the garlic starts to soften, 7 to 10 minutes maybe?
  3. By this time, perhaps the water is boiling. Throw in your spaghetti and cook according to package directions (I personally start testing it around 9 minutes).
  4. Add the anchovies and the rest of their oil to the garlic pan. Stir, breaking up the anchovies as much as you can. Cook this for about 2-3 minutes, just to get it broken up well and combined.
  5. Add olives and cook about 5 more minutes - you just want to warm everything up.
  6. The spaghetti is probably ready by now. Drain it, keeping a little bit of the water in the pot.
  7. Pour the contents of the saucepan over the spaghetti and mix thoroughly.
  8. Add salt, pepper, balsamic vinegar, and parmesan to your hearts content. Mix thoroughly.

Thoughts

I highly recommend having several relatively easy pantry meals in your recipe arsenal. There’s something so satisfying about taking very basic ingredients and making them into a nourishing meal with little or no planning. Recently, I made this around 9:30pm on a weeknight after I realized it was too late to cook the slightly more complicated thing I had planned.

Trey hates recipes whose names are a list of all the ingredients, so I decided to give this a number since I do have several pantry spaghetti recipes. Call this whatever you want and adapt it however you want. Needless to say, you’ll be impressed with yourself.