PARMESAN BROCCOLI PASTA WITH MAPLE CURED BACON

My daughter Arabella and I are both supermarket recipe card fanatics - every time we go shopping we come home with numerous cards which go into my recipe folder never to be seen again!! So I decided this weekend, it was time to "organise" them and I was very pleasantly surprised by how many good meal ideas we have collected. Here is a very old one from Waitrose which we had Saturday night with our gorgeous friend Ceri and it was delicious.

Ingredients for 4 people:

500g dried pasta

2 x 200g packs purple sprouting broccoli spears or tenderstem broccoli

2 tsp olive oil

250g pack of smoked back bacon with maple syrup, chopped (this was from Waitrose)

3 cloves of garlic, crushed

150ml dry white wine

100g freshly grated Parmesan

As a cheese addict I also added grated cheese!

Start off by trimming the thick ends from the broccoli and roughly cutting the stems into 1cm lengths, leaving the florets whole.

Cook the pasta according to the pack instructions in salted boiling water. Ours took 10 minutes.

After around 6 minutes, throw in the broccoli as well.

At the same time heat the oil in a frying pan and cook the bacon for 4-5 minutes until crispy and then add the garlic for a further minute.

Pour in the wine and let it bubble, scraping up any bits from the base of the pan, until the wine is reduced by half.

Drain the pasta and broccoli but keep a couple of tablespoons of pasta water in the saucepan. Then mix all the ingredients together and add about 80% of the Parmesan. This is where I also added grated cheese too!!

Finally serve with some freshly ground black pepper and the remaining cheese.

This was absolutely delicious - the broccoli, bacon and cheese all go so well together - Arabella adored it so I would say it is kid friendly and healthy too. Arabella would eat pasta every night if she could so its great to have it with greens in too! It was all very quick and simple as well - a perfect recipe!

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