Holiday Recipe Club: Poached Egg Butternut Squash Pasta

Easter is right around the corner, which means it’s time for the Holiday Recipe Club. See, Erin over at Big Fat Baker came up with this awesome idea where a bunch of us come together near a holiday and make something from a list of traditional holiday ingredients. In this case, our choices were spinach, carrots, and eggs.

My first choice was to make deviled eggs, but since Jason is up north and it’s just me at the house, I had no intention to make 10 deviled eggs for one person, mainly because I would have no self control and eat the entire thing in one sitting. So here was my next option: butternut squash pasta with wilted spinach topped with a poached egg.

This pasta dish is incredibly easy to make with very minimal cooking, which makes it perfect for a weeknight meal. The only cooking involved is the butternut squash and the pasta. Easy peasy. Once all that is cooked through, they get tossed together with some olive oil, spinach, cranberries, almonds and freshly grated Parmesan. Then top it off with a poached egg and voila, dinner is served in 20 minutes.

As you can tell by the list of ingredients, there’s a lot of fun goodies in this dish. You have the pan fried butternut squash, giving you that wonderful crispy yet tender texture, along with the sweet cranberries, crunchy almonds, wilted spinach and the oozing egg yolk slathered throughout the pasta, some even held through the crevices of the shells. Mmmmm…

It’s a quick and tasty dish that’s not only full of wonderful flavor and textures but it’s incredibly cheap and healthy to make. You can’t beat that!

Butternut Squash Pasta (adapted from Budget Bytes):

Yields 4 servings

• 8 ounces large shells
• 4 tablespoons olive oil, divided
• 12 ounces cut butternut squash
• 1/2 teaspoon dried sage
• Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper pepper, to taste
• 1 cup baby spinach
• 1/3 cup dried cranberries
• 1/4 cup sliced almonds
• 1/3 cup grated Parmesan
• 4 poached eggs, for serving

In a large pot of boiling salted water, cook pasta according to package instructions; drain well.

Heat 2 tablespoons olive oil in a large skillet over medium high heat. Add the squash, sage, salt and pepper, to taste.

Cook, stirring occasionally, until tender and cooked through, about 10-15 minutes; remove from heat.

Add the 2 remaining tablespoons olive oil, pasta, spinach, cranberries, almonds and Parmesan.

Gently toss to combine until the spinach has wilted.

You can serve it as it is, or…

Top it off with a poached egg, which I highly recommend.

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