Garlicky pasta & lemon: served daily but always different

Tonight I made the garlicky pasta with lemon recipe that I have been making every night for dinner for the past few evenings. Each night I add different ingredients to play with the base flavour. Tonight I added coarsely chopped tomatoes, two kinds, about three tablespoons of coarsely chopped hazelnuts, some chopped basil and, of course, grated Parmesan, about a quarter cup. At the table I added some extra dried pepper flakes and more grated Parmesan.

The trick here is to use richly-flavoured field tomatoes. If your tomatoes are the hard, tasteless variety form Mexico, this dinner will fail. It desperately needs the strong, fresh tomato flavour. I also used about ten cherry-sized yellow-cream tomatoes. All in all, this had lots of tomato flavour.

One often reads how hard it is to feed oneself on a budget. No it isn't. Not if one knows a little about cooking. If you insist on opening a can, you had better be prepared to open your wallet.

I bought my pasta on sale for 89-cents for a 900g bag. My tomatoes and broccoli came from Thomas Bros. Farmer Market on highway 4 south of London. (I used one, large, red tomato.) Parmesan is expensive but I buy it in big blocks from Costco. It's a lot of cheese but it keeps and goes a long way. The hazelnuts came from the Bulk Barn in the Smart REIT run mall in London's northwest.