Easy Creamy Spinach Chicken Pasta

Now everybody needs a very simple recipe like this up your sleeve, particularly when you have a busy household. The great thing about it is it only uses a handful of ingredients and these are sorts of things that I normally have in the fridge or in the kitchen already. To start off we're going to slice up our chicken and all you're looking for is a nice fine slice on these. It's going to feed about four people here and you get that bit of chicken, bit of spinach, that creamy sauce and then a tagliatelle all together. It's a match made in heaven. Chicken is sliced and ready to rock. Give the hands a quick wash. So heat onto the pan and let's get cooking. Gonna add into the pan a little butter, a drop of oil. So on a fresh board, we're looking for about four cloves of garlic here. And because there's not many other ingredients in here, I'm going strong with a bit of garlic. You just want a real hum of garlic right the way through this. And if you don't like garlic, leave it out, it's up to you. But I do love that the cream just gets infused with that rich garlic flavor. Get it completely coated in all that butter and oil, and once it is, we're going to leave it to sit with a bit of sea salt and black pepper. Just make sure that it's evenly across the base of the pan here, because this is a good point to ensure that you get lovely browning on your chicken. And if it's clumping together, it's just going to sweat and you won't get that lovely color. And the butter in there as well is starting to turn a nutty brown here, so you're kind of building little elements of the flavor to this final dish. So adding a generous bit of salt here, and one thing I think people always forget to do is to add lots of salt to your pasta water. Otherwise the pasta doesn't take on a bit of flavor and it just becomes a bit bland. Now with a good tagliatelle like this, you're only going to need to cook it out for about three or four minutes in the pot. And once you've kind of turned it and you've got a nice bit of a golden brown thing going on here, it's time to get in there with the garlic. And the minute you get the garlic in there, it's just this eruption of flavor. I know at this point, there's not much going on here. You've got chicken browned off, but the garlic just kind of lays the foundations for a really gorgeous sauce. We talked about kind of ingredients that you have in your kitchen, and particularly when it comes to family meals, it's important that you use what you have. So to this, we're gonna add in a little bit of frozen peas. It's gonna bring down the cooking temperature a little bit, so don't be put off by that. You just need to give it a second or two to kind of take off that frost bite off your peas. All you're looking for is the chicken to be cooked through but don't worry too much because we're going to add the cream in here and this is going to ensure that it kind of simmers out and actually kind of makes it become a little tender. So heat down to a sort of bare minimum. I know it's all very simple and very easy but that little hit of cream is just going to make this dish sing and you're going to bring that slowly up to a nice steady simmer and while it's doing that we're going to get in there with a bit of lemon zest. You want the cream to kind of be less loose and more sort of viscous, more kind of thickened. And once it's at that point, it's time to get our pasta in, which should be cooked at this point. So I'm just going to give it a quick stir and check. Always when you have to take the hot piece of pasta. This is... You can see that in literally about five or ten minutes, you have the bones of a gorgeous dish happening here. The last little ingredient or the second last ingredient in here is some baby spinach. So I'm going to pop that straight in. Again, we're looking to kind of oomph up the nutrient value to a dish like this, particularly when it's speedy. And all you've got to do is sort of tease that spinach into that creamy sauce. The steam will do all the hard work for you. It'll literally take a minute or two just until that breaks down and you've got nice tender pieces of spinach and a really rich and creamy sauce. Now, if ever there was a recipe that was perfect for just-in-the-door moments, this is it. You can see how quickly it comes together and the results are spectacular. Secret ingredient time. This is what makes this dish. Sun-blushed cherry tomatoes, full of flavor. They're like little bursts of excitement in a dish like this. So straight into the sauce. Might not be gourmet, maybe it is. I mean this is the sort of thing I want to sit down and eat. So straight into the pasta. And this is why I love pasta as a staple ingredient in your kitchen, because it's a building block for so many different dishes. And using the specific types of pasta that suit different dishes is actually quite important. Something like tagliatelle works really well when it comes to, you know, a luscious creamy sauce, whereas something like penne is much more suited to something like a bolognese or a ragu. So getting your pasta right is really important, and that's why I love to kind of pick up. Different types of pastas because they really kind of inform how you're gonna cook in the kitchen. So this is a perfect example of why tagliatelle works really well here. It's that creamy sauce that it's just enveloped all the way over every single strand and now this is ready to serve up. Don't forget any of those little bits at the bottom. They always kind of sink and you don't want to forget them because that's where the flavors are. It's a really simple dish, you know, and that's what the bones of this are. That's why I don't add basil. That's why I don't add the cheese. It's just a really good pasta recipe that takes minutes to make and it's flavourful. It's really humming with flavour. It's the garlic and it's the sun-blushed cherry tomatoes. This is one you need to try.