Roasted vegetable pasta with parsley, basil and mint pesto

I know, I know: it's not always exactly tempting to venture on a grand culinary adventure after, say, a ten hour day at work and a gruelling commute home. Sometimes you're just too tired to cook - and those are the times that ready meals - lovingly prepared by a robot on an assembly line - are for, right? Wrong. With a bare minimum of skill, a mere 30 minutes is all it takes to cook something genuinely delicious from scratch, as this excellent (and cheap!) pasta dish proves. In all honesty, it takes me longer to battle with the microwave than it takes to whip this one up.

Ingredients:

For the pasta:

• 1-2 peppers
• 1 large red onion
• 1 or 2 courgettes
• 4 - 5 few cloves of garlic, unpeeled and gently squashed
• Dried pasta - I prefer wholemeal but it really makes no difference

For the pesto:

• Fresh parsley, basil and mint - I'd say basil is the key here and should as such dominate, but you might well disagree.
• Lemon juice - a generous dash (to taste)
• 1 clove of garlic (that has been roasted in the oven with the veg...keep reading, please!)
• Olive or rapeseed oil - a good glug of
• Salt
• Black pepper

How to cook:

Turn the oven up to gas mark 4. Clean and chop your veggies and place on a roomy roasting tin with the garlic cloves and a generous glug of oil. A word of warning from bitter experience: do not peel the garlic cloves, or you'll end up with a killer dose of garlicity. Place in the oven and roast for approximately 30 minutes, or until they look softened up and ready to eat. Stir occasionally.

In the meantime, prepare your pesto. This couldn't be any easier: simply place all ingredients into a blender and press the button...job done. Pick one of the garlic cloves that have been roasting with the veg, peel and add to the blender (watch your fingers - the garlic clove will be hot). That's the pesto done...easy, eh?

Once the veggies are about halfway done, put your pasta on the boil - once it's boiling on full steam, it'll be ready in approximately 10 minutes.

Once the individual ingredients are done, you can either spoon them on a plate in separate layers (pasta - veg - sauce) or mix them all together in a large bowl.

Finish with a generous shaving of parmesan or other hard, salty Italian cheese (don't be tricked by the ready-grated versions though: sweaty doesn't begin to describe the aroma) and serve with some nice bread and, why not, a glass of white wine.

Better than that microwaveable spaghetti Bolognese you were eyeing up, isn't it?