This delicious linguine pasta dish features spinach, pea shoots, onion, and garlic, with some hearty portabella mushrooms and sweet red bell peppers.

Pasta is such an essential go-to dish to create a flavorful and easy meal with a variety of vegetables and fresh ingredients. I love me a good farm-to- table meal; and these fresh chopped veggies from the farmer’s market are the perfect companions to pasta linguine. Even better, this a fast and easy quick meal, and even the busiest of us can whip up this gourmet dinner in no time!

Pasta has been getting the cold shoulder a lot lately with the ever increasing popularity of gluten free and low carb diets. Even I personally have been limiting my carbs lately and trying to eat a lot more whole and raw foods, but there will ALWAYS be a place for pasta in my life. The key is to utilize it as a vehicle for the fabulous fresh vegetables and sauces you create. My kids love to eat pasta, and I love to give it to them loaded with nutritious vegetables and ingredients.

Pasta is also an excellent dish when you need a carb loaded meal to give a boost of energy such as at the end of a long Ramadan day of fasting!

I love this recipe because it is fast, fresh, and easy. No sooner than you finish reading this post, you can whip up this quick gourmet meal.

I simply use inspiration from the fresh produce available. At the farmer’s market I picked up some pea shoots for the first time (at the suggestion of my friend), fresh spinach leaves, portabella mushrooms, red bell peppers and tomatoes.  I made a quick marinara sauce with all the tomatoes I got, then used the remainder of the vegetables to make a delicious rainbow of textures and flavor. I always start by sautéing some onions or garlic, in some olive oil or in this case both. Then add in the mushrooms and peppers until they start to become tender, and add the leafy spinach and pea shoots at the end so that they do not get too soft and release water. I toss this fabulous mixture with the pasta and drizzle my delicious homemade marinara over it, and we have a gorgeous and colorful meal in no time!

Garnish with fresh basil or parsley. Bon a petit!

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I love pesto. And I love avocados. This dish combines these two loves into a flavorful and fresh pasta salad!

I’m a proponent of creative cooking, and using ingredients you have on hand to create delicious meals. Its a survival skill that comes in handy when you are a busy mom just trying to feed hungry mouths. My daughter’s school was having a family luncheon pot luck, and I had signed up for some type of pasta salad. I am known to try new recipes for the first time on large groups. Brave I know, but it hasn’t back-fired so far. I knew I wanted to make pesto, but I never make it the traditional way (you may have read in my other posts about my husband’s deathly nut allergy). So I don’t use nuts and I usually improvise.  So here I had tons of parsley, avocados, and perfectly juicy and plump cherry tomatoes.

Oh that avocado can whip into a beautiful green “butter” for my pasta salad! Who needs nuts? (omega-3 fats, CHECK)

Lulu do you want to pick some parsley leaves from the garden!?

My daughter nods enthusiastically.

And so it was created: avocado- pesto pasta salad. No nuts, but plenty of kick from garlic and earthy parsley, the creaminess of the avocado, and a tad of lemon juice and we were set for a delicious meal in no time! We used bow tie pasta because, well, they are my daughter’s favorite. What 3 year old girl wouldn’t love to eat bow ties?! Anything to make eating appealing and fun for kids, right?
Lemon or lime juice is absolutely necessary here to keep the avocado’s vibrant green color. Some salt, pepper, and crushed garlic season the “pesto” perfectly, and the fresh parsley leaves give this sauce the perfect texture and earthiness to replace the traditional basil. At the end I add sliced cherry tomatoes and I sprinkle on some freshly grated parmesan cheese. YUM.

This thick, creamy sauce is a simple combination of blended avocados, lemon juice, salt, pepper, crushed garlic, olive oil, and parsley.

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Your other baker friends will be green with envy when they see and taste how fluffy and gorgeous these pancakes turn out! Not only because they are delicious, but because they are packed with spinach! The lovely green hue does little to the taste because the spinach is ground so fine in the Vitamix blender. All you are really getting is the healthy benefits, but the spinach itself is tasteless. Spinach is packed with more than the required daily value of vitamin A, vitamin K, manganese, and folate and plenty of iron, anti-oxidants, and anti-inflammatory phytonutrients. If you are struggling to get your kids to eat healthy spinach as I have been, then you will just LOVE this recipe. Not only is it full of spinach but it is made with whole wheat flour, less than 2 tbsp of sugar, and healthy vitamin D milk and eggs. I have little to protest in this recipe. You could use only 1 tbsp of sugar in the recipe if you plan to use syrup, but because I only topped it with fresh fruits and pureed raspberries, I added an extra dose of sugar.

The green color is very vibrant and fun, and there are a TON of excuses to eat a fun green pancake! Use any of these reasons to get your kids excited about breakfast and a spinach packed pancake (tip: you don’t HAVE to tell them there is spinach): St. Patricks day, those MSU game fans (I’ll take BLUE thanks), Halloween, conjuring Incredible Hulk powers, make a “Very Hungry Caterpillar, or just a green monster kind of morning!

This recipe yields one of the best pancakes I have ever tasted and it is adapted from allrecipes.com; find it here. I substituted the white flour for whole wheat flour and pureed the spinach with the milk to make a nice bright green spinach milk. I was thinking about how we add spinach to all of our smoothies because its flavor is so discrete, so I thought it would be a great addition to pancakes as it would not really alter the recipe. For the topping, simply puree fresh or frozen and thawed raspberries and add sliced bananas. It is the perfect balance of sweet and tart! So here it is! Enjoy!

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