Light Alfredo Sauce

Meal: shrimp alfredo pasta with vegetables
Inspiration: Guiltless Alfredo Sauce

Cooking the alfredo sauce

I've made this alfredo sauce before and we totally love it.  We had shrimp in the freezer and some veggies that work well with a creamy sauce, so that's what I put together. Of course you can use it however you would like, serve it with breadsticks to pretend you're at Olive Garden.  Toss in some cooked chicken (leftovers or maybe from one of those rotisserie chickens) and some cooked broccoli.    I also like the idea of using it to top a white pizza -- with chicken, roasted red peppers, zucchini, tomato, spinach, etc.  And of course you can turn it into something else by adding some Cajun seasonings to have a creamy Cajun chicken pasta.  Or some Mexican seasoning, jarred jalapenos, chicken, cheddar, to make a copycat of the Uno's Pizzeria rattlesnake pasta. 


I actually make this recipe pretty much as written, which is really surprising because I like to use a recipe as inspiration rather than a written rule.  But of course some slight variations happen -- I used almond milk rather than cow milk and replaced one ounce of the cream cheese with a wedge of Laughing Cow light garlic & herb spread to add more flavor.

It helps to use an immersion/stick blender to make the sauce, put your ingredients in a glass measuring cup or the mixing beaker that comes with the blender and whiz it up.  Easier to clean than a full-size blender.

Pasta, shrimp, veggies, and sauce.

I cut up the shrimp into bite-size pieces and threw it in with the boiling pasta.  I made 6 ounces of dry pasta so we could have leftovers and it was the perfect amount of sauce and pasta.  I also threw in a bit of frozen spinach in the pasta water for the last minute.  Gotta remember to drain your pasta in a mesh sieve when you do that or all your spinach will float away with the water. 

And I added a package of frozen baby vegetable blend with sauce, the sort that you cook in the microwave.   Throw everything into the sauce pan and give it a toss to coat.  So delicious! 

There are leftovers!