This pasta with pesto and sundried tomatoes is my best recipe in less than 30 minutes.

There is nothing you can not like about it. Its convenient, easy, tasty and did I mention VERY affordable….aka cheap!

When you’re sitting at home after a long day’s work, there’s nothing better than putting together a meal totally from scratch. Something that I often hear from my friends is that they don’t have enough time to make something fresh for themselves after work.

Does that sound like you? Well, I’m here to show you how to make this pasta with pesto and sundried tomatoes in less than 30 minutes of your time. It’s a gorgeous meal that’s not only nutritious, delicious, but easy to make too!

The key to preparing fresh meals quicker is preparing your ingredients in the right order.

For this delicious pasta with pesto and sundried tomatoes recipe you will need the following ingredients.

• Basil 2 ½ cups
• ½ parsley
• 2 cloves garlic
• ¼ cup of pine nuts
• 1 medium lemon
• Salt&Pepper
• ¼ cup of olive oil
• 10 ounces of pasta (your choice this recipe is very flexible)
• ¼ cup of sundried tomatoes – chopped

First lets make pasta…

Step 1: Fill a saucepan with water two thirds of the way and set it to boil on a high heat. We’ll want to season the water too so the meal has flavour at every level. Add enough salt to the water to make it salty to taste.

Step 2: Once the water reaches boiling point, pour your pasta into the pan. Feel free to use any pasta shape that you like. Spaghetti is a classic choice, but shapes like fusilli and penne are great at catching flavourful sauce within the pasta itself. Just note that some varieties of pasta have a longer cooking time than others (especially whole wheat), so try to account for that if you’re a bit short of time.

In order to make this recipe extra colorful and delicious I used spinach spaghetti.

Let’s begin making fresh pesto sauce…

I grow my own basil at home, so I was able to make my pesto sauce from a freshly picked basil leaves. You can still buy fresh basil from the farmers market or if you are curious how to grow basil at home. Check out this amazing guide on how to grow your basil indoors.

Step 3: To make our beautiful pasta sauce, we first need to unlock the flavour of sun dried tomatoes. Roughly chop the sun dried tomatoes and then add them to a frying pan, then saute them on a medium heat with a little bit of olive oil and salt. Once the tomatoes shrink slightly, take the tomatoes off the heat and put them aside for later.

The main part of the sauce is made from the rest of our ingredients.

Step 4: In a food processor or blender, add the basil, parsley, garlic, lemon, seasoning and oil before mixing. The goal is to emulsify all of the ingredients into a thick sauce. If you find that the sauce is too thick, you can add some pasta water, or some extra glugs of oil. Make sure to scrape off any troublesome bits of ingredients that are stuck to the sides of your blender (you don’t want to bite into a big chunk of garlic).

Fresh pasta with pesto sauce and sun-dried tomatoes – final Step

Now it’s time to put our pasta dish together.

Step 5: Drain off the pasta with a colander once it’s cooked. Immediately serve onto a plate and cover with the pesto sauce. You want to mix the sauce well and ensure that the sauce fills all of the crevices of the pasta shapes. To finish, place the sun dried tomatoes on top of the sauce.

You can also experiment with making an avocado sauce, that is just as easy to make. For a similar quick pasta recipe check out my 15 minute spaghetti with avocado sauce recipe!

If you tried this dish for yourself, show off your results in the comments below. I’d love to hear your thoughts!