Creamy spinach pasta (slimming world friendly)

This is an adaptation of a recipe I used to make called spinach and ricotta pasta and you can use ricotta if you want to but to make it even more slimming world friendly I substituted sieved fat free cottage cheese or you could also use quark if you wanted to. You can have a generous 85g of ricotta as a healthy extra you could make it using that if you want to but by using the sieved cottage cheese it makes this dish syn free.

It looks like an enormous amount of spinach but it cooks right down to quite a small amount, I often use frozen leaf spinach (defrosted) to make this but don't use chopped leaf spinach as it goes to mush. It's very easy to sieve the cottage cheese or another way to make it smoother is to blend it just do whatever makes it easier for you.I know you only need 150ml of the stock and a cube makes a pint but even though its a bit of a waste of the rest you can keep it for a few days in the fridge if you were making something else later in the week for which you'd need some stock but what I tend to do is buy Marigold vegetable bouillon powder and that way you can just make as much as you need.

Creamy spinach pasta

200g  fresh spinach (or defrosted frozen leaf spinach)
250g sieved fat free cottage cheese
150ml vegetable or chicken stock (made from a cube is fine)
2 cloves garlic (crushed) 
salt and pepper
250g (dry weight) rigatoni or whatever pasta shape you like.


Boil the pasta according to pack instructions until cooked then drain and set to one side.

In a large pan spray with low cal spray oil and fry the garlic for a minute or two then add the spinach and cook for a few minutes for spinach to wilt. Add the stock and sieved cottage cheese and cook for a few minutes over a low heat. Taste before adding salt and pepper as the stock is quite salty and you might just need pepper.

Add the cooked pasta to the creamy mixture and mix together very well.

Syn free on extra easy plan