One-Pot Pesto Pasta, Potatoes, and Green Beans

 My friend Lisa sent me this awesome cookbook for my birthday – The I <3 Trader Joe’s Cookbook! I love it. It has so many amazing recipes that use ingredients that are all found at TJ’s. There are lots of different categories with a great variety of unique recipes with lots of beautiful pictures! I especially love the “starters and small plates” section – there are so many great ideas for party food in there!

For the first-time recipe, Andy and I decided (okay I decided and he agreed) to make One-Pot Pesto Pasta, Potatoes, and Green Beans. I really liked this recipe because it looked easy, delicious, and I had all but two of the ingredients. For the two missing ingredients, (pesto and green beans) we made a quick trip to Aldi to pick them up. So we didn’t go to TJ’s, but Aldi’s brother company (also called Aldi) owns Trader Joe’s, so it all kind of works out!   

To start, we cubed, boiled, and set aside one potato.

 

Using the same pot/water from the potatoes, we cooked the spaghetti. When it was done, we added the green beans (Aldi’s green beans are seriously amazing. You’d never know that they were frozen. Seriously!) to steam for a minute.

 

It wasn’t all going to fit in my sauce pan, so we had to transfer it to a wok to mix everything together. We then added goat cheese (I wish I would have had lots more!!), pesto, the cooked potatoes, s&p, and red pepper flakes. We stirred everything around to mix and ended up having to add milk to make it more saucy.

As a slightly unhealthy yet totally delicious side, we made these TJ’s Scallop Bites. So good! They took WAY less than 40 minutes to cook in my oven, so just a warning in case you ever make these.

 

YUM!! The pasta was wonderful and flavorful. I really liked how well the potatoes and green beans went with the pasta. These flavors were definitely meant to be together! The scallop bites were excellent too. They actually have pretty large pieces of scallops in them!

We enjoyed a Arcadia Ales Cereal Killer Barleywine Ale. Andy really loves Barleywines, but I usually think they’re too sweet. This one, however, was not to sweet at all! I could definitely knock back a couple of these by myself. Absolutely delicious.

 

The beer went very well with our dinner. It had a great balance of sweet and bitter. Definitely a winning food/beer combination!

I can’t wait to try out more great recipes from this cookbook. It is available on Amazon if you’d like one for yourself!