Creamy Avocado Spaghetti

The first thing I ever learned to cook was spaghetti with meat sauce — in home ec class, no less.  I can remember asking my Mom if I could use my newfound skills to cook dinner for her and my Dad, and I put a little shake of everything I could find in the spice cabinet into that sauce.  The bad news:  my Mom has always had a very well-stocked spice cabinet.  She looked up from her plate and asked, “is this dill I taste?”.  That was my first lesson on how not to make spaghetti sauce.  But as a teenager there were a lot of spaghetti nights with friends, and in those settings we tended to revert back to just throwing in whatever we could find, and it was always a ton of fun.

My girls love spaghetti too, but they are not big on tomato sauce.  I need to keep working on that one.  In the meantime, I thought I would try Angela Liddon’s quick creamy avocado pasta with basil, lemon, garlic, and olive oil.  I stayed true to the recipe at the beginning, although I opted for just one clove of garlic (I wanted the kids to like this).  Once everything was blended in the mini-chopper, it seemed thick and very lemony, so I added some extra olive oil, a few tablespoons of water, and a good handful of shredded parmesan.  And suddenly, it tasted just like summer with all that fresh basil and olive oil.  After mixing the sauce with the spaghetti I added about 1/3 cup of the starchy pasta water and topped it off with more parmesan.  There was a lot of sauce — the recipe says it is for 2 servings of pasta; I made 3 servings of pasta and there was still sauce leftover.

The verdict?  Amazing!  And so easy to make.  Lauren was clearly thrown off by the green color, but she was fine after a few bites.  Samantha loved this dish.  But she also commented, “I wish it was bucatini instead of spaghetti!”.  That’s my girl.