A healthy and hearty take on pasta! Being Italian, my body is made up of 95% pasta...soooo it's only fitting that my son gets fed a lot of pasta! But being so little, I don't want to give him too much tomato as it's quite acidic so I got creative with this one.
This was a massive hit with my son and it was so quick and easy to make. It has so much goodness in it too with protein and fiber from the beans, iron and vitamin C from the spinach and antioxidants from the pumpkin. I will definitely be making this one again.
NB: I did not end up using the GF spiral pasta pictured. I used brown rice pasta instead as I had some already open.
INGREDIENTS:
Frozen Spinach (this brand of spinach is frozen in cubes. I used 3 cubes for this recipe which is roughly 60g)
1x can of fagioli cannellini beans
1/2 small pumpkin
Pasta of your choice. I used brown rice pasta.
1/2 tsp salt reduced chicken stock
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
METHOD:
Peel and chop pumpkin into cubes.
Steam pumpkin until soft (I used my tommee tippee steamer/blender but you could easily do it on the stove. Alternatively you could boil pumpkin if required)
Dice onion and lightly fry in saucepan.
Pour beans into colander and rinse under fresh water, set aside.
Once onion is transparent, add beans to the pan and allow to soften.
Once beans are soft, mash using a potato masher until smooth
Add spinach and allow to defrost. Mix into bean and onion mixture.
Once your pumpkin is soft, blend it into a puree'
Add pumpkin puree' to bean and spinach mix and stir to combine.
In a separate pot, boil pasta.
Blitz mix in a blender until desired consistency. Add water from pasta to thin mixture if required. I added a couple of spoonfuls of water to my mix as it was a little thicker than I wanted. NB: You do not have to blitz the mixture if your baby has progressed to more chunkier puree'/mashed foods.
Once cooked, strain pasta and add to bean mix, using the mix as a 'sauce'
If dairy free is not required, this recipe would also be amazing with some Parmesan cheese mixed through! If you wanted to add some parmesan cheese I would recommend adding some finely grated cheese right at the end once everything is mixed, and stirring through :)
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