Pasta with creamed spinach recipe

I had made the soup and had a small bowl left over, not quite enough for two persons. I also had some leftover, fresh spinach. So I cooked the remaining fresh spinach using very little water, blended it with my leftover cramed spinach soup and I had a new sauce for a spinach pasta dish.

To me, a creamed spinach recipe like this makes more sense than having regular, green-colored spinach pasta, which contains maybe just 2 percent spinach, more for colouring than flavoring. Certainly you will not get much of the nutritional value of spinach from eating spinach pasta.

The original recipe for creamed spinach soup uses heavy cream but the resulting dish was, surprisingly, not heavy. I have also tried it using coconut cream. While coconut cream imparts a totally different character, it tastes just as good to me.

Since this website is about pasta recipes rather than soup recipes, let me first share my creamed spinach recipe for pasta. Then, if you wish, simply prepare the same recipe using more water or soup stock, for a creamed spinach soup.

Pasta with creamed spinach and tempeh

• 1 medium onion, chopped
• 2 tablespoons butter
• 500 grams fresh spinach
• pinch of sea salt
• 1 cup water or chicken / vegetable stock
• 2 egg yolks
• 1 cup heavy cream
  
  
• 500 grams dried pasta, cooked according to instructions

Method:

1. Heat butter in a heavy pan. Add onions and salt, and cook over medium heat for 5 minutes or longer, until onion turns soft and translucent.
2. Wash and roughly chop the spinach, saving a few leaves for garnish. Add spinach to the onion and continue to cook for another 5 minutes. Do not cover, as doing so would cause the spinach to lose its green color.
3. While spinach is cooking, boil the water or vegetable / chicken stock and then add to the spinach.
4. Remove from heat and allow to cool. Blend in a food processor.
5. Before serving, beat the egg yolks into the cream. Warm the spinach sauce to barely simmering and add the egg yolk / cream mixture. Do not overheat, lest the egg curdles.

Notes and suggestions:

To make a creamed spinach soup, simply add more water or vegetable / chicken stock - two or three cups more depending on how thick or light you want the soup to be.
As mentioned earlier, this creamed spinach recipe also works well with coconut cream rather than dairy cream. Coconut cream is sold in small cartons, just make sure you buy the cream instead of the milk, which is more watery.
Feel free to add other ingredients, such as cooked chicken, shrimp, scallops. You can either mix them into the sauce or serve them separately, as a topping. In the photo above, I served it with tempeh, a soybean product so as to keep to the vegetarian theme for this recipe. Just cut tempeh, fry in butter until golden brown and serve on the top.
This creamed spinach recipe also works well with other dark green vegetables, like kale or broccoli.
Try this Alfredo version of a creamed spinach recipe.