This is a really quick and easy dish to throw together. The only tricky bit is the spiralizing of the sweet potatoes, but once you’ve done it a couple of times you should get the hang of it.

Pesto is a great Italian dish. The only problem with the traditional dish is the wheat content in the pasta. You can find a number of wheat free pastas in the shops now and some of them can be fine, but most tend to cram in the carbohydrates with very little in the way of antioxidants or good quality fibre. The sweet potato noodles in this dish replace the pasta and, in all honesty, add a lot more flavour to the dish. Fresh pesto is a fabulous sauce. It contains plenty of olive oil which, importantly, has not been cooked and so retains much of its valuable antioxidants. You’ll notice in this recipe the onions are gently fried so as to avoid the oil becoming too hot and beginning to smoke. Oil that has been allowed to overheat will begin to smoke and some of the chemicals generated, like lipid peroxides and aldehydes, can be quite toxic. The uncooked olive oil in the pesto also loads flavour to this sauce, but it’s always best to invest in the best quality virgin olive oil you can get your hands on to enhance the flavour.

Recipe

1. Blend your pine nuts, basil, garlic and olive oil in your food processor, blender or Nutribullet to create your pesto sauce. The sauce can be made as a batch and stored in a sealed jar in your fridge until you need to use it.
2. To make your sweet potatoes noodles sweat your onion in a wok with 2 tbs of olive oil for a couple of minutes until it becomes translucent. Be careful not to allow you oil to become too hot. You want to avoid any smoke coming off your oil. Add the water to the wok and your spiralized sweet potatoes, cover and steam for 5 minutes.
3. After 5 minutes toss you noodles and steam for another couple of minutes.
4. Drain the water from your pan and mix in your pesto sauce.
5. Garnish with freshly chopped basil and serve immediately.