‘The Pioneer Woman’: Ree Drummond Makes a Classic Pasta Primavera Recipe ‘Magical’ With 1 Ingredient
Looking for an easy go-to pasta dish for a quick weeknight dinner that’s loaded with healthy vegetables? Ree Drummond has the perfect recipe for tortellini primavera that totally fits the bill and is customizable so you can use up ingredients in your refrigerator.
Ree Drummond adds plenty of vegetables to her tortellini primavera recipe
While demonstrating how to make the easy pasta dish on an episode of The Pioneer Woman, Drummond shared, “It’s pasta with beautiful spring vegetables. It’s got all the good things in life.”
She added butter to a pan and cooked onions and garlic and worked on prepping vegetables while cooking the tortellini. “Pasta primavera means spring pasta and it has beautiful spring vegetables,” she explained as she added cauliflower, carrots, asparagus, salt, and pepper to the pan.
“The great thing about pasta primavera is you can use pretty much any vegetable you like,” she said, noting that she’s also used bell pepper, broccoli, zucchini, and yellow squash before.
“You don’t want to overcook the veggies,” Drummond advised. “There still has to be time for the veggies to simmer in the sauce so I usually just let them start to cook and then I move on with the liquid.”
‘The Pioneer Woman’ star made a rich creamy sauce for the pasta
Drummond added chicken broth to the pan, sharing that you can add white wine as well. She allowed the broth to reduce for a few minutes, then added “one of the key ingredients to pasta primavera” — heavy cream. “It mixes with that broth and the veggies and it’s just amazing. It makes the most delicious sauce.”
The Pioneer Woman star added grated parmesan cheese, salt, and pepper, then stirred everything to combine the ingredients before adding diced ham, frozen peas, and basil. She drained the tortellini and poured it into the sauce.
“This is a pretty rich pasta dish — so much flavor going on,” The Pioneer Woman star said. “The sauce itself is really decadent but then you throw the cheese tortellini in there and it’s just out of this world.”
The full recipe is available on the Food Network website.
Drummond offered more ideas for delicious pasta primavera
Drummond wrote about her easy pasta dish in a 2014 blog post on The Pioneer Woman website. “I am a lover of any form of pasta primavera, and I pretty much have been for the past 25-plus years,” she wrote. “This recipe is a spinoff of the one I posted here back in the dark ages of this cooking website — except instead of big chunks of veggies, I keep them in a fine dice, and instead of penne pasta, I use cheese tortellini — and my two girls and I absolutely devoured it for dinner last night.”
The Food Network host continued, “It’s everything that’s lovely about pasta primavera — crisp spring veggies, flavorful cream sauce — but the tortellini really makes it magical.”
She offered up some other ideas to switch up the pasta dish, as well as a suggestion to use frozen peas and carrots. Drummond suggested chopped or sliced mushrooms, crumbled goat cheese, softened cream cheese, and any other type of pasta that you have in the pantry.
