Despite the fancy name, Spaghetti Aglio e Olio is actually quite simple. So simple, in fact, that you only need 7 ingredients!  Aglio means garlic in Italian and Olio means oil. No prizes for guessing the main ingredients here.

If you want to make this at home, you're going to need the following :

Chop your garlic like this

1. A packet of uncooked spaghetti.
2. One or 2 bunches of parsley .
3. About 3/4 cup of olive oil. Again, preferably extra virgin.
4. One entire head of garlic. 
5. One lemon.
6. One spoon of chilli flakes.
7. Salt and pepper to taste.

As with every spaghetti dish, you want to start out by filling a pot of water about halfway, adding a generous amount of salt and then heating it to a boil. Next, get your garlic and peel it. If anyone has a better method for peeling garlic, put it in the comments below please - I'm sick and tired of slicing it gently and peeling each individual clove. 

Now is a perfect time to prep your parsley. Pull the leaves off the stem - we don't want any stem for this. Chop the parsley as fine as you can, the finer you chop it, the better. Not only will it taste better, it will look better, but that's subjective.

Dice your parsley as fine as possible

Once your garlic has been peeled, finely chop it into slices. Done? Get a pan and pour the olive oil into it and start heating it. Once the viscosity of the oil resembles that of water, and well before the oil starts smoking, toss all your garlic into it and keep agitating the garlic so you don't brown it unevenly.

Wait till your garlic starts to brown!

By now, your water should have boiled so put the spaghetti in and go back to your garlic. Keep agitating the garlic until it starts to brown. Toss your chilli flakes in there and take it off the heat completely. The garlic will continue to brown and the oil will absorb the flavours of the garlic and chilli. 

If you've timed this right, your pasta should done by now. If not, wait till it's done and put your olive oil back on the heat to warm it slightly but be careful as to not brown your garlic any more. Pour the spaghetti directly into the olive oil pan along with a quarter cup of the spaghetti water. 

Toss your parsley into the pan and mix thoroughly. You want an even distribution of parsley - no green spots. Once you've achieved this, squeeze the juice of your lemon into the pan, mix it in and season to taste. 

Mix it all together!

Now, I'm not going to lie - when I first saw this recipe, I was skeptical. Spaghetti with chilli? Lemon juice with garlic?  It's incredibly simple and on their own, the ingredients are nothing special. However, the final product was nothing short of spectacular. It went down an absolute treat with my brother and sister and they finished it all!

If you want, you can toss in an extra spoon of chilli flakes - it's the only thing I'd have changed when I made this dish. I put in a healthy amount of parsley and garlic but I was skeptical about the chilli. If you're making it, learn from my mistakes and toss that extra spoon of chilli in there. On top of the extra chilli, I wish I had some parmesan on hand. I think that some grated parmesan would finish this off quite nicely but I didn't have any with me. Next time!

On the off chance that someone does end up making this, let me know how it turns out! I love the idea of someone reading my posts and trying it out for themselves!

The final product. I ended up making it a second time, hence the difference in noodle type.