Olive & Feta Pasta

I haven’t posted a recipe in a while because I have fallen into a recipe rut. All I have cooked in the last couple of weeks is Butternut Squash Lasagne… yes, again – it’s just THAT GOOD! And Spaghetti Bolognese, which is also THAT GOOD because I put a whole lot of red wine in it.

Anyway, I had chorizo in the freezer and spinach in the fridge, and was pretty much ready to make my Creamy Chorizo Mushroom Bake again, when I realised that I was due to be away for a couple of days, the chorizo was still in the freezer and the spinach was probably going to go off if I didn’t cook it that very evening. It was quite a dilemma, I can tell you.

So, I invented something. Food inventing isn’t hard, you really just throw together lots of things that you think are nice, and chances are that if you put them all together, they will taste nice all together. It’s a bit of a secret though, so don’t let that on if you ever invent any food, and everyone will be SUPER impressed. Unless you mess it up. DON’T MESS IT UP. Anyway, I bought a block of feta, a jar of olives and a tub of Philadelphia and threw this together. It was bloomin’ tasty. You should make it! Unless you don’t like feta or olives, in which case, definitely don’t.

These pictures are a bit rubbish because I was chatting to my housemate and forgot to take any until I was almost done. Ooops.

Olive & Feta Pasta300g Pasta – 29pp
200g Tub of Philadelphia Light – 8pp
200g block of Feta – 15pp
1 jar of green or black olives (in brine, drained) – 3pp
1 jar of roasted peppers (in brine, drained) or a raw pepper or both – 0PP
Handful of mushrooms – 0PP
2 leeks – 0PP
200g Spinach – 0PP
Garlic – 0PP
= 55PP / 9PP per person (6 portions)
To reduce points - Try and stretch the sauce to more portions, use less feta.


1. Cook your pasta as per the package instructions
2. Chop up your raw veg (leeks, mushrooms, pepper) and fry in a big frying pan or a wok with either FryLight or a splash of water until soft
3. Add the olives and spinach and cook for 5 minutes until the spinach starts to wilt
4. Chop your feta into small cubes then put half of them in the pan. Stir well so everything is slightly coated in the feta and it’s pretty much dissolved. Yum.
5. Add the Philadelphia and stir it until it resembles a sauce. The vegetables should have given off a bit of water so you shouldn’t need milk to dilute it.
6. When the pasta is done, add to the pan and stir until everything is well combined and the sauce coats the pasta well.
7. Add the second half of your feta and stir well for a couple of minutes until everything is warm through but the last lot of feta is still in little blocks.
8. Serve!

This is so tasty. Adding the feta in two halves means that the sauce itself is very feta-y, but then you get little lumps of feta in with it too. SO MUCH FETA. It’s quite a salty dish with the olives and the feta, but it’s not overbearing. As always you can add as much or as little veg as you want. I made this initially using 40g of pasta per portion but it wasn’t quite filling enough so I have upped it to 50g a portion which is included in the recipe above. Because the dish is pretty saucy, it stretches quite far, which is awesome. You could even add more portions of pasta, but then I think you might go a bit far.