Pasta is a staple tea-time dish for most UK households but if you’re bored of making the same old concoction, Jamie Oliver says one unexpected ingredient will yield the most delicious results.

The popular celebrity chef and restauranter has shared how to make a quick and easy all-in-one veggie pasta that contains four of your five fruit and veg a day.

The beauty of the dish is that it’s all made in one pan, so you simply need to chop up the ingredients and throw them in to cook.

Jamie recommends making sweet peppers the hero of the dish and uses three whole ones - red, yellow and orange - for a boost of flavour (and colour).

The peppers are accompanied by red onions, courgettes, garlic and finely chopped basil stalks, all of which are cooked down in a pan with a splash of oil until they are caramelised.

For a dash of flavour, Jamie adds chopped basil leaves to a pestle and mortar and smashes these up with a dash of salt and olive oil to make a zingy basic oil dressing.

After 20 minutes simmering in a pan, Jamie adds some whole cherry tomatoes along with pasta shells, water and a dash of salt and pepper, before adding the unexpected ingredient: cottage cheese, to bring the dish together, giving it a “gorgeous” flavour.

Jamie explains: “This has had 10 minutes and the pasta shells have only sucked up the gorgeous tastiness from the veggies. I’m going to use four tablespoons of this cottage cheese in here. I’ll stir this through and just let those little curds warm up a little bit.”

He adds: “So guys look at that. That’s a really nice easy one pan comfort food dish packed full of the good stuff. Properly tasty. Full of lovely veggie flavour, you’ve got those curds of lovely cottage cheese that are in there, and that hit, that perfume, of the basil oil, it’s fantastic.”