Lola’s Kitchen is a feature on Lola’s Reviews where I talk about all things related to food, cooking and baking. These posts can be recipe posts or more discussion type posts about food. I love cooking and spend some time in the kitchen almost every day, so I wanted to give it a place on my blog as well. The banner for this feature is designed by Michelle from Limabean Design.
I think this is the first Lola original recipe I share on the blog. Usually I just find a recipe somewhere, make it and tweak it. With this recipe I came up with the idea, found recipes on the internet, but instead of using a recipe I sort of put it together from my own ideas and what I saw on the internet. Basically I wanted a slightly salty, creamy, pesto tasting spinach sauce to serve with pasta. It took me a few tries, but I think it’s great now! It’s easy to make, contains lots of vegetables and has a creamy and slightly salty taste.
Ingredients
- Creamy frozen Spinach – 1 kg/ 4 cups
- Red bell pepper – 3
- Onion – 1-2
- Creme Fraiche/ greek yoghurt/ Alpro Soy Cousine/ other plant based milk or creme – 250 ml/ 1/2 cup
- Pesto – 3 heaped teaspoons
- Low salt vegetable Bouillon Cube – 2
- Water – optional
- Olive Oil
- Pasta
I usually serve it with spinach flavored pasta, like spinach tortellini, which I did for today’s post. I used about 250 gram pasta, which is fresh. I think with dried pasta it’s about 75-100 gram per person. You can also it eat it with any type of pasta. With pasta this recipes serves 3-4 people.
Method
- Slice and dice the onion and red bell pepper.
- Heat the oil and then bake the onion till translucent.
- Add the red bell pepper, stir well and bake for 5- 10 minutes.
- Now add the crème fraiche (or other sauce base you’re using), pesto and the bouillon cube and stir well.
- To the sauce add the frozen spinach. Stir until mixed well.
- If you serve it with pasta make sure to start cooking the pasta around now. Let the sauce cook for a few more minutes until the sauce is warm through and through and the pasta is ready as well.
- Enjoy!
Pictures
Baking onion!
Sliced and diced paprika, I like to slice them in really small pieces.
Close up of the frozen spinach
Add the paprika
Add spinach
Add the pesto and bouillon cube
Add the creme fraiche
Boiling the pasta
Close up of the creamy spinach sauce
Creamy Spinach sauce
Wow that looks really good. You know, I don’t think I’ve had any type of spinach sauce with my pasta before. I like spinach but haven’t thought about it in a sauce. I’m usually a straight marinara sauce person but once in a while I will make a cheesy sauce.
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I like putting spinach in sauces. I like spinach, but it’s hard to combine it in a dish sometimes, so then I came up with this sauce. I recently also put spinach in a risotto, that turned out surprisingly well. I prefer this sauce, peanut sauce or a red tomato sauce with my pasta.
OKAY THIS LOOKS DARN DELICIOUS. Im not a big fan of spinach, but i would soooo try this. PASTA YAY. *wipes drool off laptop* It looks so good, well done, Lola! 😉
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I like spinach, although I prefer when it’s part of a recipe like this. I don’t like the non creamy spinach though, for some reason I need to have the creamy spinach else I don’t like it. I hope you give it a try 🙂
Lola recently posted…Lola’s Kitchen: Creamy Spinach Pasta Sauce Recipe
Oh my god, that looks good ! You seem to really like your red bell peppers, don’t you ? 😉
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Yes I love my red bell peppers! You’re the first to figure out my secret. I buy about 8 – 10 red bell pepper every week. You should see the faces of the supermarkt personal sometimes ;). I add red bell peppers into almost every dish, they are one of my favourite veggies. I still can hardly believe that I disliked red bell peppers when I was a kid and only staretd liking them once I became a vegetarain and forced myself to eat them.
Lola recently posted…Lola’s Kitchen: Creamy Spinach Pasta Sauce Recipe
I always loved them but couldn’t digest them – but it seems it passes with time, no more problems now ! We just cooked your sauce tonight with basil pasta, my boyfriend added black olives but I didn’t, it was very good 🙂 I’ll post the pic next sunday.
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Oh that must have been bad loving those veggies and not being able to eat them.
And yay I am so happy to hear you tried out this sauce! Looking forward to see the picture next sunday!
Mmmm, it’s really too bad my husband doesn’t eat dairy. Sigh.
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Maybe you could make it with a non dairy product like coconut milk or almond milk? You would probably need some cornstarch as well to make the sauce a bit thicker, but it might work and still has approximately the same texture.
You can get oat milk cream which is the right texture – we have some and I think it would go well with your delicious sauce, which I’m definitely going to try, Lola!
I actually make it nowadays with a soy based cream from the brand alpro soja that works great for this sauce and has the right texture. I should probably update the recipe with that.
Omg that looks delicious! Best part, I love spinach and so does the BF. He’s not a big pasta fan, but he does like trying something new from time to time. I’m going to try this and see if we like it. It looks fairly healthy too. The only thing I’m not familiar with I’d the creme freche. You listed it with Greek yogurt. Are they basically the same? Have you used both?
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Oh sounds like this is a rgeat reicpe for you! I also like spinach, but sometimes I have a hard time finding recipes to put it in. I am not a big pasta fan eithe, but I do like it now and then. It has lots of veggies and if you want to go for healthy I would advise to use the greek yoghurt as that contains less fat than the creme fraiche.
Creme Fraiche is a type of sour cream, but less sour if I can believe wikipedia. I tried it wth creme fraiche and with greek yoghurt and the taste doesn’t different too much, but greek yoghurt is less fatty.
Haha! How do US peeps measure spaghetti? Um, well I don’t measure, I just dump it into the water when I think its enough to feed us all. 😉
Oh yum! Congrats on your new Creamy Spinach sauce. I will have to take your recipe out west this summer when I visit my folks to try it with them.
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But that’s so unprecise, lol. I lvoe grams it makes things so easy, I can never get used to those US measurements and just drew a blank when thinking of how to mention pasta in US terms.
I hope you give it a try! I really like this sauce!
Ooh, yum! I love spinach and I love spinach pasta! I just had spinach raviolis with pesto a couple weeks ago. Well, for St. Patrick’s day, since it’s green! But this looks super delicious, minus the bell peppers! I really hate bell peppers, and my mom loves them! I always end up picking them out. 😛
Oddly, we measure pasta by grams, too. My mom is from Germany, so she sticks with metric even though she’s been in the US longer. I like it better, too, plus I was a Science major so I definitely used it more than the silly US system!
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Oh spinach would be a great dish for St Patricks day indeed! Ofcourse you can easily make this without the red bell peppers or add another vegetable you liek instead of them. I hope you give it a try!
I just can’t seem to get used to the silly US system and hate having to convert recipes every time. Glad to hear you also measure pasta in grams, that makes sense to me ;).
Oh yum. I love creamed spinach in all it’s different varieties. So yummy. My favorite spinach recipe is spinach quiche. So so good.
And again. I love your spinach cubes! So much cuter than ours comes. lol
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I just love creamed spinach, when I just became a vegetarian my mom sometiems had trouble thinking of way to get me all my veggies and would just warm up a bowl of creamy spinach to eat. I really became fond of it then and nowadays try to figure out way to put it in dishes, I recently make a nice spinach quiche with lentils and masala. Simple, but really good! I’ll have to do a recipe post of that next time I make it. What do you add to your spinach quiche?
I don’t know why they don’t have cute spinach cubes there in the US. I am so used to our spinach cubes, I can’t imagine how they can look else.
Hmmm never tried lentels in mine! Usually I do onions or green pepper in with the spinach. If I have a lot of veggies on hand I’ll add broccoli, tomato, green peas in as well. Then some cheese 🙂
Next time I’m cooking with spinach I’ll snap a picture 🙂
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hmm sounds good and I am sure it looks nice with all those green veggies. Looking forward to see a picture of your quiche 🙂
I love tortellini! I have some chicken/prosciutto in my fridge now! I bought the Alfredo sauce but this one looks so much better!! I adore Red bell peppers and onions.. I would add mushrooms to this because mushrooms and spinach are yummy!! Saving this one! YUM!
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Me too, tortellini is one of my favourite types of pasta! Although I usually go for cheese or psinach flavoured ones as I am a vegetarain. I don’t like the taste of mushrooms, so that’s why I never add them to my dishes, but I am sure it would be a nice addition. I hope you give it a try 🙂
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This looks AWESOME. I love pasta with spinach sauce! But then I love pasta with most things haha. I tried making a sauce with fresh spinach recently, and it LOOKED delicious, but I waited to long to use the spinach, so it was too bitter and I didn’t want to risk it and had to throw out the sauce. =/ Maybe I’ll try again! I think my favorite pasta sauce is just bolognese (and I make a damn delicious one if I may say so myself), but I like a lot of others too!
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I am not really a pasta eater and only have a few pasta recipes I eat. That’s such a shame you had to throw out your dish especially as it looked delicious, but it’s better not to risk it if the spinach tasted bitter. I am usually lazy and use frozen spinach, it’s easy and I prefer the taste of it above fresh spinach.
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If ever I was to post your recipe in French on my cook blog and link it to your own recipe here, would you mind ?
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I didn’t knew you had a cook blog, it’s a shame I can’t read french :(. And no problem, as long as you link back to my post I am okay with you posting my recipes on your blog :).
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Thanks a lot, I posted it here : https://keginiza.wordpress.com/2015/05/08/epinards-cremeux-de-lola/
Don’t worry, I’ll start posting recipes in English on the e-reader junkie next month 🙂
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So yummy looking too! WOW your first original recipe congrats Lola. I really applaud you. Anyway I’m going to have to bookmark this recipe to try. ❤️ Thanks for sharing it.