Flavorful Pasta Primavera | fresh vegetable pasta with a light creamy sauce | easy 30 minute meal

Hey my home cooking friends! Today we're making a deliciously easy pasta primavera. This pasta gets its name from the Italian word for spring because it's made with bright fresh spring vegetables. It has a light creamy sauce that has tons of flavor without being heavy. This makes a great meatless Monday meal or any day meal and makes a large batch enough for eight servings. If you want to see how we make this fresh and flavorful pasta, make sure you are subscribed to our channel, let us know where you're watching from in the comments, and come on into the kitchen with us and let's make some pasta primavera. So the first thing we'll do is prep our veggies. I love how many vegetables are packed into this pasta. Even our kids gobble them up. We like to include zucchini, yellow squash, asparagus, cherry tomatoes, bell pepper, and spinach. Carrots and peas are some other popular additions, but use your favorites. In addition to all our veggies, we'll be adding a few aromatics for bright fresh flavor including garlic, lemon, and basil. Trim the bottom inch or so off your asparagus. It can be kind of tough and woody. Also, I always prefer thinner asparagus in general. For that same reason, it's just more tender. We'll use about 10 asparagus stems and cut them into one inch pieces. Next we have about a cup of cherry tomatoes which I'll just cut in half. We'll also use a bell pepper. Red is my favorite, but orange or yellow would be good too. We'll just cut this into one inch pieces as well. Next we'll cut the stems off our zucchini and yellow squash, halve them lengthwise, and slice them. For our garlic, we'll peel and mince four cloves or however much you like. And we'll thinly slice some fresh basil. For our lemon, just slice it in half so we can juice it. We're also going to use some pecorino romano cheese, so we'll get that grated ahead of time as well. You could use parmesan if you don't have pecorino romano. However, I really do think this cheese has tons of extra flavor, so I highly recommend it if you can. We'll only be adding a half a cup to our pasta, but great extra to serve at the table. Everyone likes extra cheese. All right, that's it for our prep. Now it's time to start cooking. We've got a large pot of water we've brought to a boil. We're going to salt it really well. This is going to infuse a ton of flavor right into our pasta. We're just going to use spaghetti noodles, but you can really use anything you like. Penne pasta is another great choice for this recipe. So we'll cook our pasta until it's just al dente, keeping in mind that it's going to get a couple more minutes of cooking at the end when we mix it with our veggies. When it's ready, we'll drain our noodles. I love this little strainer gadget. It just clips onto the side of the pot and makes straining so easy. Then we'll add a couple tablespoons of olive oil and toss it around to coat our pasta so that it doesn't stick together. Then we'll set our pasta aside and cook up our veggies. Toss all the veggies except for the spinach into a large pan over a medium heat with a couple more tablespoons of olive oil and saute them for a few minutes. We don't want to cook these in too much. We want them to be tender but still nice and fresh, especially the asparagus. There's nothing worse than overcooked asparagus. This should only take about five minutes or so. The spinach cooks in seconds so we'll throw that in at the very end. Season the veggies with some sea salt, black pepper, and some red pepper flakes, however much you like to suit your taste. Make sure to stir it around as it cooks so they all cook evenly. Once our veggies are nice and tender, I'm just going to push them to the sides of our pan and we'll add a quarter cup of butter, our minced garlic. I also like to add a teaspoon of chicken better than bouillon. It adds a great full flavor to our pasta. If you want to make this dish truly vegetarian, you could use vegetable bouillon or leave it out entirely. Maybe just add a bit more of your seasonings if you like. So we'll get that butter melted, our garlic lightly sauteing, and we'll mix this all into our veggies. All right, now let's finish assembling this dish. Throw all your fresh spinach just right on top of those cooked veggies, and we're going to add some goat cheese. So pasta primavera is known for having a very light creamy sauce. A lot of people use a bit of heavy cream for this, but I like to mix it up and use a little goat cheese along with our olive oil and butter to achieve this. It gives it that slight creaminess and it also adds a really delicious bright flavor. So I'll crumble about five ounces of our goat cheese right over our spinach. Then in goes our pasta and we'll get it all mixed together. As we do, our spinach will begin to cook and wilt and our goat cheese will melt to coat our pasta. The last couple ingredients we'll add are the juice of half a lemon, half a cup of our grated pecorino romano cheese, and our fresh basil. Toss it all together to incorporate all those delicious flavors. Of course, give it a taste to check your seasonings and your pasta primavera is ready to serve. Thanks for hanging out in the kitchen with me today. If enjoyed this video, drop us a like and a comment and make sure you're subscribed to our channel so you don't miss our other family favorite recipes. Have a beautiful day and happy home cooking!