Sun Dried Tomatoes and Mushroom Pesto Pasta

I saw Giada De Laurentiis prepare this on Food TV once and decided to give it ago. It is a super easy dish that only takes a few simple steps and tastes fantastic. In the ingredients photo you'll see that I used garlic paste instead of fresh garlic. This is simply because this is all the corner store had. Always use fresh garlic, it just has a much better flavor.

You will need the following ingredients
(serves 2):

3 cloves of garlic
150g of sun dried tomatoes
200g white button mushrooms
250g pasta (any type)
1 cup fresh basil
Olive oil
Kalamata olives (optional)
Salt (to taste)
Cracked black pepper (to taste)


Step 1
First cook the pasta. Once it is done rinse with cold water and set aside.

Step 2

Chop up the olives into slices and set aside. These are optional. I find that the olives give a nice bitterness, which complements the pesto.

Step 3
Dice up the mushrooms. Drizzle some olive oil into a frying pan on medium heat and fry the mushrooms for about 5 minutes.

Step 4

Take about 1/3 of the mushrooms that you just fried up and place them into a food processor. The remainder of the mushrooms we will put into the pasta later. Next place the sun dried tomatoes, the garlic, and the basil leaves into the food processor as well. Add a tbs of olive oil, a pinch of salt, and plenty of cracked black peeper. Grind everything into a paste. Have a taste and add more salt and pepper if required. 

Step 5

Fry the paste for about 2 minutes in a frying pan on medium heat. Now add the pasta and the olives you prepared earlier, and the remainder of the mushrooms. Mix everything together until the pesto is evenly distributed. Serve on a nice plate with some basil leaves for decoration and enjoy.