Pink Pasta Sauce with Spinach and Tomatoes {vegetarian}

This easy PINK PASTA SAUCE recipe with 10 ingredients features pine nuts and spinach for extra oomph and comes together in 30 minutes. This is quick enough for a weeknight (one of those miracle quick and easy pasta recipes with few ingredients), but also delicious for a vegetarian weekend spaghetti dinner served with homemade no-knead bread and a quick green salad.

Ok so for today's meal I was between heavy and slightly-less-heavy, but I just COULDN'T share with you anything too light, even like the grain bowls, with these temperatures. Desperate times, man. It's just SO cold.

I LOVE vegetarian pasta recipes, maybe even more than heartier meat sauce pasta situations. Honestly meals like this feel very balanced to me with a salad on the side in an appropriate portion, plus its vegetarian, so good for the environment and other things you may or may not care about. 

Plus, it's a pink pasta sauce, so there's that.

Tomato Cream Sauce Recipe

On top of that, this meal is so dang simple and comes together in just a few minutes - 30 if you're quick at cooking, maybe a few more if you don't cook a lot or are managing some toddler's life meltdown while you cook.

We're basically making a simple marinara but adding spinach, heavy cream, and pine nuts for flavor. Pasta with spinach and tomatoes that is also creamy and pink? Yes, yes, yes.

PS, if you want to make this even faster, you can just add the spinach, cream, and pine nuts to frozen marinara or a jar of plain sauce! EASY, and so delicious. 

Ingredients and Ingredient Notes

You need! Spaghetti. Onion. Garlic. Whole tomatoes (I sprung for the expensive ones, but any store brand is fine!), spinach, cream, pine nuts, and a teensy bit of kosher salt, sugar, and crushed red pepper to your taste. Parmesan for topping unless you don't want to.

Some Variations:

• Use any type of pasta you like! I've made this with long and short pasta and it's all delicious.
• Whole tomatoes crushed by hand are lovely in this recipe, but any canned tomatoes you like work well.
• You could skip the heavy cream and make this dairy free, but this is a really lovely creamy sauce so I'd not skip the cream EVERY time.

Step By Step Instructions

1. First, start some water to boil for the pasta. Cook the pasta to al dente per the package directions, and save a cup or so of the cooking water right before you drain it. Set the pasta aside.
2. Meanwhile, make the sauce. In a large skillet, add a drizzle of oil with the onion over medium-high heat. Sauté the onion for 5 minutes or so until it's soft and translucent but not browned, then add the garlic. 
3. Stir the garlic into the onions for one minute, then add the tomatoes. Crush the tomatoes with your hand as you go, I like a few big chunks but mostly small pieces.
4. Sprinkle in the salt, sugar, and as much crushed red pepper as you'd like at this point, too. 

At this point, you'll just let the sauce simmer until the pasta is cooked and drained. Stir the sauce every few minutes, and reduce the heat to medium-low to let it simmer but not bubble too harshly.

When the pasta is done, add the spinach and cream to the sauce. Stir just for a minute to wilt the spinach very slightly (since it'll keep wilting as you add the pasta), then taste the sauce and add some more pinches of salt to your preference.

Note that adding the pasta almost always takes away from the seasoning (salt) a bit since it's fairly plain, even when cooked with salted water. At this point, the sauce should be just on the edge of too salty, then it will be perfect once you add the pasta.

Add the spaghetti, and taste one.more.time for seasoning. If the spaghetti wasn't very salty from cooking water, add a bit more salt. Splash in a few tablespoons of the reserved pasta water at a time to create a sauce thin enough to coat all of the pasta. 

Toss everything together with tongs, then serve! Topped with pine nuts, parmesan, and extra red pepper flakes, omg this is just so good. 

I didn't use baby spinach here, and the heavier leaves hold up well, almost like kale, when this is all tossed together. The sweet cream and garlicky sauce are SO good with the buttery pine nuts. 

This: after-work, so cold and tired, healthy-but-cozy-but-creamy. Get it, get it.

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