Creamy Butternut Squash Pasta - Easy Recipe.

Today I'm going to show you how to take a butternut squash and make a homestyle Italian dinner your whole family's going to love. These are in season right now and this pasta dish is really creamy, it's comforting, and it's really the type of pasta dish that you find on tables all across Italy. It's very homestyle, you're not going to find it in a restaurant, but you guys are going to love it, so let's put it together. So for ingredients what we have here is I have some potatoes cubed up ready. I have the butternut squash already cubed up. Pasta, we're using pasta mista, which is just like a mix of broken pastas. We have some cheese, not too much cheese. This was actually pretty creamy without the cheese, so we're not going to put like two pounds of cheese, just some cheese for flavor. I have carrot, celery, and onion already chopped up. Tomato paste, salt, and of course everything starts with a little olive oil, some olive oil. And that's really it. So what we're going to do is we're going to start off here with just heating up a little bit of olive oil, like a generous amount of olive oil. We'll heat this up and then we'll go in with the carrot, celery, and onion. Get that all in here. We're just going to saute these for about a minute, just so that until they start to soften up. And just for reference here, you can see that I cut the carrot, celery, and onion really small here. So we'll just let these saute for about a minute or two, just till they start to soften up a little bit. And then we're going to add in the tomato paste. And I have about one tablespoon of tomato paste. It's going to bring in a nice tomato flavor. And right now, pretty much what we're doing is we're creating like a nice flavor base for this pasta. So this is really going to carry itself all the way through and flavor the whole pasta dish right here. So you definitely want to saute it, allow these flavors to really build in the pan. And now, as you can see, like the onions are really soft here, and that's pretty much like the indication that we'll go in with the tomato paste. So we're just going to add that tomato paste right in, give it a little stir, and really bring these flavors together. And when you cook the tomato paste in here, in the base, it really brings out a different flavor, as opposed to just throwing like a tablespoon of tomato paste into like a broth. It's more mellow. Here, it's a little more bold. So we're really building a bold tomato flavor into this carrot, celery, and onion. All right, so this looks pretty good. You can really smell it in here. It smells amazing. Now we're going to add in the potatoes and the squash. We're just going to throw them right in there. We'll give this a little mix. You can see here that I cubed the potatoes and the squash around the same size, just so that they cook around the same time. Mix this all up, allow everybody to become friends. Might actually get in here and give it a little toss. It's a little easier. And now we're just going to saute this for a few minutes, just to allow all these flavors really to start coming together. Then we'll go in with the broth. Before we go in with the broth, we're just going to season this up with a little salt, like that. Give it one final mix. I'm not adding any pepper to this. I feel like it doesn't really need it, so I'm going to skip the pepper. And then for broth, I have vegetable broth. And I think the vegetable broth really works well in this. You could do chicken broth if you want, or water, right? But vegetable broth will definitely bring in a little more flavor. So we're going to add some in. And we're going to cover the potatoes and the squash. Enough broth to cover them, just like that. And now we're going to let this cook for about 15-20 minutes until they start to soften up. So this has been cooking for about 20 minutes. You can see that the potatoes are starting to fall apart. If you put a little pressure on them, they break apart. So this is a good indication of the time where you would add in the pasta. So that's exactly what we're going to do. So we're going to add the pasta right in. And this is pasta mista, just like a broken pasta. And if you can't find this in stores, you can kind of create this yourself by breaking some spaghetti, some linguine, some fusilli. Just kind of break them all apart. And now you have pasta mista. And you can see here that we do not have enough liquid in here to cook this pasta. So we're going to add in some more broth. Add a couple of ladles in. And you kind of have control here on how much liquid you want. If more of a soupy pasta or something that's more creamy. So this looks pretty good. I'm going to add a little bit more. You know what? I'm just going to add the rest of this in. That looks good. And now we're just going to cook it until the pasta is cooked. And the cooking time on this is usually a little longer than what it says on the package. So for example, this package said 10 minutes. And this is probably going to wind up taking about 12 minutes to cook. So just be mindful of that. It usually takes a little longer cooking the pasta when there's other things in here. Right. So we're just going to let this simmer for about 12 minutes. And I have a few recipes on my channel where I cook the pasta right in the pan with peas and beans and different things. And a lot of times people see this and they think there's something wrong. But there's actually a little science to this. Right. So when you're cooking the pasta in here, you're creating more starch and you're naturally creating more cream in the dish. So this actually is like the secret or the key to making these creamy like home style pasta dishes. And this one particular, you know, you're using the butternut squash and it's in season. And this is definitely like a seasonal pasta. Right. So we haven't we haven't had this since last year. So I'm really excited to eat this. It's really good. It smells really good. And these were the type of pastas that my grandmother used to make all the time when I was growing up. You know, just simple dishes like this. And I've said it in the past, I weren't crazy about them, but now we love them. And it just shows you that you really don't need much to make a really good dinner to feed your family. So the pasta is ready. So I'll show you what we're working with here. You can see that we have this. I've said it in the past. We have this creamy lake, this creamy pond. That's what you want to look for when you're making these types of pastas. If you have this in the center, you're going to guarantee a creamy pasta. So we're just going to stir this up. And you can see now that the pretty much the butternut squash really melted and it created this nice sauce in this pan. And you can see that tomato, the potatoes kept their shape. This just looks so good. So now we're going to do is we're going to turn off the heat and we're going to add in some cheese. And we're not going to add in a ton of cheese. We're just going to add a little bit because you can see that it was creamy already. We didn't really need too much cheese to create the creaminess. The pasta itself was creamy. So we're just really just adding enough cheese here just to give some flavor. And we're just going to stir this in. And you can really see here how much creaminess is in this pan. And a lot of it is really from the butternut squash. That really broke down and it created almost like a sauce. And it also absorbs some of the flavor from the cheese, which actually makes it taste even cheesier. So if you have kids, they really might like this one. So we'll get this on a plate and we can show you what we're working with here. I'm getting really hungry. This smells so good. I'm pretty excited here. I think my wife is too. But this right here is pure, pure comfort. This is a bowl of comfort right there. So good. The squash really brings in a different flavor with the cheese. The squash mixed with the Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese. It's just, I think you have to make it to really taste it. It's just something else. I highly recommend it. And if you come in here, you can see that I only cooked a half a pound of pasta or 250 grams of pasta. But this easily feeds, I would say three. Right here we have this and then also that extra large bowl that I prepared for myself there. This is a great family dinner. I'm telling you guys are going to love it. And if you like this one, I also have a creamy zucchini pasta. That's more of a summer vibe and this is more of like a fall, but definitely try them. And if you try any of my creamy pastas, let me know how you like them in the comments. Don't forget to hit the bell, like and subscribe.