Sam's Greek Rigatoni

My Greek Rigatoni in my special pasta bowls

This pasta dish is one of my original signature dishes. I make it when I am short on cooking time, as it only takes 15 minutes to prepare. However, this does not mean that this dish is lacking in any way; as far as I am concerned, my Greek Rigatoni is one of the healthiest and tastiest pasta recipes around. Try it and let me know what you think…

A couple points:

• As much as possible, I use only authentic Greek ingredients for all my recipes as I know it makes a difference in the taste of the final product(s).
• Any style of pasta noodle can be used for this recipe, though I recommend using something like rigatoni, penne, and farfalle as opposed to linguine or spaghetti type shapes. I alternate between rigatoni and a Greek pasta type known as “makaronia kofta” or “cut macaroni”, which is short-cut tubular pasta (“tubetti” in Italian).

Same recipe with the Greek short tube pasta

Recipe:

½ lb. Rigatoni (or other) pasta
½ lb. Greek Feta cheese
8-10 Greek sun-dried tomatoes (stored in oil)
¾ cup Kalamata black olives
1/3 cup Greek extra-virgin olive oil
1 tbsp. Greek oregano
Fresh-ground black pepper

1. Bring salted water to a boil and put pasta on to cook (cooking time will vary depending on the noodle but should be around 12-15 minutes).
2. Pit and chop the Kalamata olives into pieces (not too small). Also, chop the sun-dried tomatoes into ribbons, then cut the feta cheese into small cubes.
3. Prepare and heat the extra-virgin olive oil in a large sauté pan.
4. Drain the pasta well once it has cooked and add it to the heated olive oil in the sauté pan, then add the feta cheese cubes, chopped black olives, and ribboned sun-dried tomatoes and heat through by tossing repeatedly for a couple minutes until you see the cheese just starting to melt. Season with oregano and ground black pepper, give it a couple more tosses in the pan and serve hot.


Serves 2-4.