By Christina Denton, age 39
Okay, I’m a 39-year-old mother-of-five and during quarantine I found TikTok. I’ve convinced myself it’s okay to be on TikTok at my age because people post recipes. But let’s be real, some of that dancing is on point.
So over the last couple months I’ve been watching people all over the world post about this feta pasta dish. One day I decided to try it. On a trip back from Connecticut, after an 18 hour drive, my daughter and I stopped at our local grocery store to get the ingredients. That’s how excited I was. We bought a block of feta, baby Roma tomatoes, and some Mafalda pasta. While we were checking out, a young lady was ringing up all of these items and immediately asked if we were making that famous TikTok pasta, lol! She was very excited and interesting to see if it was any good.
The next evening I prepared the TikTok pasta for dinner for my family. I cut up a red onion and some garlic. I dumped the package of tomatoes in a baking dish and placed the square of feta in the middle. I added the red onions , olive oil, salt and pepper, and also the oregano that we grew and dried ourselves this summer. Additionally, I added some cut up broccolini because I had it.
I put the baking dish in the oven at 425F for about 30 minutes. While I waited for that to bake I boiled some water with some salt and cooked the mafalda pasta. My husband and I are doing no carbs so we had ours over Shiritaki noodles. After about 30 minutes I pulled the baking dish out of the oven. Everything looked browned and cooked well. The cheese was still in the block shape so I was hesitant, thinking that it wasn’t actually melted or creamy. I took a big fork and I started popping all of the tomatoes and breaking up the cheese which was indeed creamy and gooey and it all made a beautiful sauce.
I plated the dishes for my family and added some fresh grated Parmesan cheese on top. The pasta came out delicious. I was so shocked at how easy the sauce was and how much my kids loved it. Since then I’ve made it another time for my sister-in-law and brother-in-law and their family for our special Valentine’s Day dinner. They loved it just as much as we did.
I’ve also seen a low-carb version of this sauce being served over some grilled chicken. You really can’t go wrong with this pasta dish. You can add anything that you love whether it be fresh vegetables or a protein of your choice. I believe this would be good over an old shoe as well.
A few weeks later, I returned to the same local grocery store just to do my everyday shopping. The lady at the checkout counter remembered me from a few weeks prior and asked me how the TikTok pasta came out. I told her how delicious it was and that we’ve made it several times since and she said that she was going to go buy the stuff that night and make it. All in all I would say it was a win and it’s going to be a staple within our family going forward. This also allows me to justify watching countless hours of TikTok every week.