Skinny Mushroom and Thyme Pasta Bake with Chicken and Creamy Cauliflower Sauce
The ultimate comfort food made so skinny! You'd never even know... This makes a huge, deep pan and is exactly what I did. But you could cut it in half and still bake it in a 9x13. It would just be shallower. Or any pan slightly smaller than that would work great. Really whatever it fits in!
Servings: 10
Calories: 364kcal
Ingredients
For the Cauliflower Cream Sauce: (Adapted from Pinch of Yum- my all time favorite food blog.)
- 8 cloves minced garlic
- 1 tbs butter
- 5-6 cups cauliflower florets I used two fresh 10 oz bags. So 20 oz total
- 6 cups chicken stock only 1 cup of which is added to the sauce later
- 1 tsp salt
- 1/2 tsp pepper
- 1/2 cup low fat milk
For the Pasta
- 16 oz sliced mushrooms
- 1 zucchini chopped 156 g
- 1/2 a large onion diced (170 g)
- 5 oz fresh spinach
- 1.5 tsp salt or more to taste
- 2-3 tsp fresh thyme
- 1 lb pasta I'm loving Cavatappi
- 60 grams of breadcrumbs*
- 1/2 tsp garlic salt
- 1/2 tsp Italian seasoning or more thyme
- 1/4 cup plus 2 tbs parmesan cheese
- 1 whole batch of cauliflower cream sauce
- 3 lbs chicken breast chopped
- * For breadcrumbs: I used scraps from the bolillo rolls I hollow out for my sandwiches. Just a quick spin in a food processor OR just chop em up for a chunkier crumb. I regret processing mine too much... I prefer bigger chunks.
Instructions
Make your Sauce** (See shortcut version below!)
- Bring 6 cups chicken broth to a boil in a large pot (or enough to cover the cauliflower). Add the cauliflower and cook, covered, for 7-10 minutes or until cauliflower is fork tender. Do not drain.
- While the cauliflower cooks, sauté the garlic and butter in a large nonstick skillet over LOW heat. Cook for several minutes until the garlic is soft and fragrant but not brown. You don't want it bitter! Remove from heat and set aside.
- Use a slotted spoon to transfer the cauliflower pieces to your blender. Add 1 cup of the hot chicken broth, the sautéed garlic/butter, salt, pepper, and milk. Blend or puree for a few minutes until the sauce is very smooth. You can add more broth or milk depending on how thick you want the sauce. Discard remaining broth. The one cup was perfect for mine. Set sauce aside.
** UPDATE-- I've gotten lazy and it's working: You can also just steam your cauli in a bag, whether you buy fresh or frozen, florets or even riced. I just steam in the bag as directions allow so it's nice and soft... then throw it in the blender with my sauteed butter and garlic... and the rest of the ingredients. Just 1 cup of chicken broth! So easy!
Cook Pasta
- Cook pasta for 1-2 minutes less than the package directions. You want it to be slightly undercooked inside since it will cook more in the oven. Strain and rinse with cold water to stop the cooking.
Saute Veggies
- Spray your LARGE skillet (the one that had the garlic butter) with olive oil spray and bring to high/medium heat. Add your mushrooms and a tsp of kosher salt and cook down for a minute.
- Add zucchini and onions once the mushrooms have shrunk enough to give you some space.
- Sauté for several minutes until veggies are tender.
- Add spinach, thyme, and other 1/2 tsp salt. Sauté for an additional minute until spinach is wilted. Transfer veggies to another dish
Cook Chicken
- Chop chicken into bite size pieces, pat with paper towels to remove moisture, and sprinkle with kosher salt, pepper, a little garlic salt and Italian seasoning (optional.)
- Heat the same large skillet with some cooking spray to medium/high heat. (It's ok if it's brown on the bottom, that just adds flavor and color to the chicken!)
- Place cubed chicken in single layer in HOT uncovered pan and don't stir. Leave for 1-2 minutes until nice and browned. (This is when I season the back side.)
- Flip and cook on the other side for another minute. Might need to do this in two batches. I did.
Assemble!
- Now stir it ALL together in your big pasta pot. Pasta, veggies, chicken, sauce, PLUS the 1/4 cup parmesan.
- Pour into one LARGE casserole dish or two smaller ones. I fit mine into a deep 9x13 but it was full!
- Stir bread crumbs with 1/2 tsp each garlic salt and Italian seasoning and spread over top of dish.
- Spray top of bread crumbs with olive oil spray*
- Bake at 400 for 15-20 minutes just until bread crumbs are browned
Notes
- *If you don't mind a little more fat, drizzle a tbs of butter over the breadcrumbs (or toss them in it before topping the pasta) for extra YUM. This turned out SO low in fat (FLOORED) there's certainly a little room for it. Or drizzle butter on half for your kids! Or add more parmesan or a shredded gruyere to the top!
- Next time I'll add even more veggies just to stretch the macros even farther because they were delicious and certainly not too much.
- If you count macros and want to add this recipe into My Fitness Pal, you should be able to "import the recipe" straight from the URL of this post. If you decide to half it, you can of course adjust all of the amounts, OR just tell MFP it made exactly twice as much as it did when you weigh your dish at the end. You can read over here about how to enter in and log a recipe. But here's a cheat sheet.
- Import or add ALL of these ingredients to the list in your recipe, the raw pasta and chicken amounts etc...
- Weigh your empty dish before you pour the whole pot of pasta into it. Make a note where you can save it for future use as well. Bake.
- When you pull it out of the oven, weigh it again, subtract out the weight of the pan. THAT weight is your number of servings in this dish. My finished product weighed about 3100 grams, so I told my recipe it made 3100 "servings". Go back into your recipe and edit it to show that. Now you can decide to have 300 grams or 436 grams and log easily.
- (TIP: make sure you've got your diary set to use decimals in the serving size and not fractions or you won't be able to log the large numbers of servings.)
Nutrition
Serving: 300g of pasta | Calories: 364kcal | Carbohydrates: 42g | Protein: 41g | Fat: 4.5g | Saturated Fat: 2g