On its own, pasta is still a very tasty dish to eat. Sometimes, nothing hits quite as well as a bowl of pasta or spaghetti with some tomato sauce and a sprinkling of parmesan cheese. But, there are also instances when you want a bit more food on your plate. You want something that fills you up more and is a little bit less plain and simple.
Thankfully, pasta is so versatile that you can have so many additional things with it. Below, you’ll find three different things that are great with pasta, along with some recipe ideas that involve them!
Minced beef
This really is a classic thing to add more substance to a pasta dish. Minced beef can become very flavorsome when added to a sauce and cooked slowly. Obviously, bolognese is the first idea that comes to mind. Any type of bolognese or ragu will be excellent, and they are so easy to make.
Or, you could try putting a spin on things and moving away from the Italian flavors with Cincinnati chili. This involves minced beef with some different spices – like cinnamon, cumin, allspice, etc. It’s then cooked and blitzed up to make the mince a bit smoother before topping with cheddar cheese, kidney beans, and onions. Such a tasty idea to try out!
Chicken
You can never go wrong with some chicken in a pasta dish. Loads of options present themselves yet again, but I’m going for a crowd-pleaser: chicken Milanese.
As the name suggests, this is from Milan, and it involves breaded chicken breasts topped with parmesan atop a bed of red spaghetti. It’s such a tasty little treat to have now and then, taking your spaghetti meals to another level. Of course, for something simpler, you can always dice up chicken breast and add it to some sauce, and then serve it with spaghetti or pasta.
Seafood
Seafood and pasta are a match made in heaven. A lot of people don’t realize just how diverse seafood is when you cook it with pasta. You can have it with a red sauce to create a spaghetti vongole style dish, or you could try something that’s more on the seafood side of things. Forget about a red sauce and opt for shrimp pasta with lemon garlic butter. It’s very easy to make, yet extremely delicious.
For me, adding seafood to pasta is a simple way of getting a restaurant-quality experience at home. This is the type of thing you’d order from a menu, so why don’t you bring it to your kitchen? The key is getting top quality seafood or the meal just won’t taste as nice. Don’t be afraid to spend more on better quality items here.
Would you look at that, three things that are awesome when added to pasta dishes. All three options are obviously not suitable for vegetarians or vegans, but you can easily sub things in or out. Minced beef can be swapped out for lentils or meat-free mince, while chicken can be swapped for a meat-free chicken product too. It’s a bit harder to find vegan/vegetarian alternatives to seafood, but you can get some fake salmon these days that looks pretty good.
