Our second Hello Fresh meal was rigatoni with cherry tomatoes and mozzarella, which was surely going to be an interesting one. For starters, we never eat pasta unless it’s in a sauce, and we also usually go for a healthy version rather than just the normal “white” pasta. Secondly, we never eat white onions, always red. And thirdly, I don’t like olives. Basically, this recipe had a lot of work to do to win us over!
The rigatoni is cooked separately to the rest of the meal, which is a mixture of cherry tomatoes, onion, yellow pepper, basil, olives, and mozzarella. It is then combined at the end and tossed together for an even spread. There were some things that I definitely liked about this recipe – the mozzarella and cherry tomatoes go nicely together, and for once the olives weren’t utterly horrible. Perhaps simply because there were so few of them that I was able to disguise them with tomatoes and pretend they weren’t there!
However, there are a few changes I would have made. It was just far too dry, and could have done with more of a sauce element. Perhaps a larger quantity of tomatoes would have helped to create the right kind of sauce, especially if they were blended together rather than just being cooked in the pan. I also would have seriously preferred either having red onion, or just doing without. There’s just something so bland about “white” onion when it has been cooked in this way that I hugely dislike. A better blending of the basil throughout the dish would also have improved it.
So that’s what we thought of meal number two – and with the leftovers from this added to the leftovers from last week’s post, we ended up making some Italian and Mexican themed wraps on the third day! Here’s the Vine of this meal being made so you can see it in action.
