The other night, we cooked down some of the last few tomatoes with garlic for pasta sauce. Everything was going fine until we mixed the sauce with the pasta, at which point it totally vanished into the pile of overwhelming starch. Boo! So sad! Bland pasta!

Look, you can barely even see the vegetable component.

We weren't going to make something else at that point, so I opened the crisper drawer and came up with a bag of mesclun mix and a handful of parsley.

Pasta plus copious greens = problem solved!

Fresh, crispy, highly flavored and bitter greens are clearly the best to use in this situation: the contrast in both flavor and texture makes everything so much more interesting. I think arugula, baby mustard greens, or chard would probably work best, but you can clearly play around with whatever you have; it's not like you can go particularly wrong with any salad green.

John took several bites directly out of the parsley bunch. Go chlorophyll!