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!

Mushrooms and Spinach in Wine Sauce

 

Whenever I buy mushrooms to use in a dish, I always end up with a large amount of leftover mushrooms that end up going bad. I hate that! I paid for those darn mushrooms, and it’s so sad whenever I find them old and wrinkly in my fridge. I made this dish lightly inspired by Pioneer Woman’s Burgundy Mushrooms to solve my most recent leftover mushroom issue. I’ve now fallen in love with these mushrooms and will be making this with every leftover mushroom from now on! Seriously.

For the recipe I used Red Truck, which is a red blend. I really like this wine! I bought it because it was on sale, but I’m definitely buying it again sometime.

 

The other ingredients are one package of whole mushrooms or whatever is leftover, 3/4 bag of baby spinach, butter, 1/4 onion, and whatever spices you want.

 

First I sautéed 1/4 onion in butter for about 7 minutes until they got transparent. Then I added a pinch of curry, garlic powder, salt, pepper, and red pepper flakes.

 

I added the mushrooms plus a couple splashes of water to help them cook.

 

The next obvious step was to pour myself a glass of wine, since all civilized people drink wine at 9AM on a Wednesday.

 

I cooked the mushrooms until they were very brown and the liquid was mostly cooked off.

 

Next was the wine. I started off by adding about 1/4 cup, waiting until it cooked down, and adding more.

I did this a few times until the mushrooms looked completely soaked in wine, and the wine was reduced to a syrupy sauce.

 

I then filled the pan with spinach. This was about 3/4 of a bag. I added a couple more splashes of wine to help the spinach wilt. Did I mention my kitchen smelled absolutely amazing at this point? Well, it did.

 

I let the mushrooms and spinach simmer with the wine until it was once again reduced.

 

The perfect bite! It was really good at this point, but I let it sit covered for a few hours hoping more magic would occur.

 

It worked! After a few more hours, the mushrooms turned a beautiful deep purple, and the spinach was completely drenched in wine and butter. Mmmm wine and butter. Perfect. I turned the heat back on, added a splash more wine and some more red pepper flakes. The red pepper flakes gave it a wonderful amount of heat that just seemed to go great with the flavor of the wine. The piece of bread was definitely necessary to soak up the rest of the sauce.

 

Delicious. I can’t wait to make this again. This would be perfect as a side dish or on pasta, or just eat the whole thing by yourself like I did :)

Mushrooms and Spinach in Wine Sacue

1 package whole button mushrooms
3/4 bag spinach leaves
2+ Tbsp. butter
1/4 large onion or 1/2 small onion
Garlic powder (or cloves)
Any other seasoning (I used a pinch of curry, black pepper, and red pepper flakes)
1 bottle of dry red wine

Dice onion and saute in butter for 5-7 minutes or until transparent. Add spices.
Add mushrooms and cook for 10 minutes on low or med-low. Add 4 Tbsp water.
Add a little more butter too - why not?
Turn up heat to medium until liquid is gone
Turn down heat to low and add 1/2 cup wine. Cook on low or med-low until wine looks like syrup. Continue to add wine and reduce.
Add spinach and let sit for a few seconds. Add more wine to help it wilt.
Stir around until spinach is wilted.

Let sit covered for a few hours if desired. Turn up heat again and add more wine. Then eat!