Quickies: How to Make Amazing Pasta with Whatever You Have on Hand

In our cooking series Quickies, we invite chefs, bartenders, and other personalities in the world of food and drink who are serious hustlers to share their tips and tricks for preparing quick, creative after-work meals. Every dish featured in Quickies takes under 30 minutes to make, but without sacrificing any deliciousness—these are tried-and-tested recipes for the super-busy who also happen to have impeccable taste.

Fridge pasta, pantry clean-out pasta, garbage pasta—whatever you call it, you know what we're talking about. It's the pasta you make when you haven't been afforded the luxury of several hours to gently stir a simmering ragu or individually fill tender pillows of ravioli.

It's the pasta you make with whatever the hell you have on hand.

Colu Henry might say that she's an expert when it comes to garbage pasta, though the title of her recent cookbook, Back Pocket Pasta: Inspired Dinners to Cook on the Fly, is decidedly more delicious-sounding. It's even got a hashtag.

In fact, we couldn't have found anyone more suited to our Workaholics series—in which we ask chefs to throw together a delectable dish in under 30 minutes—than Colu. Her whole book is designed for time-poor people who still want to eat well at the end of a long day.

It helps that she's literally got pasta in her blood.

"My great-grandparents came over from Italy, so culturally that's how we were raised," Colu told us during a recent visit to the MUNCHIES test kitchen.

But you can't just throw any old handful of random ingredients into a pot and expect it to taste great. There's an art to combining all of those random scraps, herbs, and condiments in your kitchen.

After a quick stroll through the MUNCHIES garden, which yielded some bronze fennel, flowering thyme, and bachelor buttons, Colu headed back to the kitchen to formulate her plan of attack and show us how back pocket pasta is done.

The basic recipe here is the same that you'd use to approach almost any balanced dish: something savory, something sweet and a little acidic, something salty, something pungent, and something bitter.

For the savory, Colu relied on a few thin rounds of fatty pancetta, which she diced into rough squares.

"I'm not a professional chef," Colu insisted with a laugh. "Don't judge me by my knife skills."

As the pancetta rendered in a pan with a little bit of olive oil, Colu prepared the other elements: halving cherry tomatoes (for the sweet and acidic), washing mustard greens (for the bitter), and unearthing some roasted garlic (for the pungent) from the depths of the kitchen fridge.

Ever the multitasker, she also set a pot of salted water on the stove to boil. When it was ready, she added one of her favorite pastas, gemelli (though you can use whatever you'd like).

As the pasta cooked, Colu then removed the crisped pancetta from the pan, replacing them with the tomatoes, which burst in the rendered pork fat and concentrated their tangy sweetness. To that she added the roasted garlic and mustard greens.

And suddenly it was all ready to come together. With the pasta perfectly al dente, Colu fished it out of the pot with a strainer and transferred it directly to the pan with the tomatoes, garlic, and greens, before reincorporating the pork.

Her secret ingredient: a ladle full of pasta water. The starch in the water helps to bind the other ingredients to the pasta instead of just slipping around each noodle. A quick toss in the pan brought everything together.

For her final touch, she added a sprinkle of picked herbs and a crumble of ricotta salata.

And that's how you turn orphaned ingredients into a thing of beauty.