I had a huge bag of baby spinach sitting in my fridge ready to be used up, so decided to go a bit spinach crazy today. This was really quite quick to put together and my little one loved sucking the filling out of the pasta tubes. Sadly my eldest wouldn’t touch it because of the green stuff (spinach). The strangest thing is though he will eat a few baby spinach leaves as they come straight out of the bag, so I did at least get some spinach into him.

Rigatoni Stuffed with Spinach and Cream Cheese

Serves 2 (1 adult and 1 kid)

Ingredients

• 80g of uncooked rigatoni pasta
•  few handfuls of baby spinach
•  2 cloves of garlic crushed
•  3 heaped tablespoons of cream cheese
•  2 tablespoons of milk
•  black pepper
•  olive oil
•  some grated Parmesan cheese

• Gluten Free – Use a gluten free similar sized pasta
• Dairy free – Try blitzing some raw cashews and mix with a little coconut milk, to make a similar consistency to cream cheese. But you can just stir this through the wilted spinach, you won’t need to simmer to melt like cream cheese.

Directions

Add the rigatoni pasta to a saucepan of boiling water and cook until al dente, drain and set aside to cool slightly.

In the meantime add a drizzle of olive oil to a frying pan over a medium high heat. Add your crushed cloves of garlic and saute for a minute of so, just to release the flavour.

Add your spinach and saute until slightly wilted.

Add your cream cheese, milk and a little sprinkling of black pepper into the spinach and stir constantly until the cream cheese is melted and covers the spinach in a thick smooth sauce.

Carefully stuff your rigatoni pasta tubes with the spinach/cream cheese mix (I pushed it into the tubes using a chopstick) and serve topped with some grated Parmesan.

Enjoy!!