This Green Angel Hair with Garlic Butter is the cover dish for Smitten Kitchen Keepers and Deb’s fans immediately went wild making it when she released the recipe on the blog on publication day.

For this recipe, you roast a head of garlic in a bunch of butter and then make a sauce out of that and a ton of baby spinach. This was super easy to make, although looking at her photos on the blog now I can see I definitely should have added more pasta water to the sauce.

I roasted the garlic a couple of days ahead of time because I already had the oven on that evening. I did it in two ramekins because I don’t have small enough baking dish. That worked out really well. When it came out of the oven I let it cool a bit, then got the garlic cloves out of the peels and scraped it all into one ramekin, which I covered with foil and shoved in the back of the fridge. On the night I made this, I threw it into the microwave to melt the butter. I didn’t have quite as many brown butter solids, but I think if I did a little bit less butter (and then added the rest after roasting, don’t worry) I could get a bit more browning.

On the night I served this, I made a full batch of the sauce using a 5oz box of baby spinach, but just made half the amount of pasta (thin spaghetti, which worked out just fine) and used about half the sauce to dress it.

This is not an in-your-face spinach dish, which surprised me. It’s very buttery and the garlic flavor was surprisingly mild. Mine was a little bit under-seasoned, because I neglected to taste the sauce. But that’s on me, I missed a cue in the recipe (“Pour the spinach sauce…”) that would have told me that I didn’t have the consistency right. But it was still tasty! I think you do want to be careful with the salt here, because you’ll be adding more with the pasta water. Next time I’ll keep that in mind and make sure to taste and adjust after I make the spinach sauce.

I put the rest of the spinach mix into the freezer, covering the top with some plastic wrap since it didn’t quite fill the container. I imagine the vibrant green color will change, but am interested to see how it holds up otherwise. It’ll be nice to pull that out sometime when we just want a quick and easy meal, or when I’m looking for something for lunch for a couple of days.

I did serve a protein with this, but I didn’t make a veggie side. I figure that we each ate an amount of spinach equal to the amount I’d use for side salads, and it was nice to not have a third element going on a weeknight.