One-Pot Creamy Tomato Pasta with Chicken and Spinach
I’m always in the mood for a warm, comforting, flavorful pasta dish that’s easy to throw together, and this One-Pot Creamy Tomato Pasta with Chicken and Spinach delivers all that and more! I can’t get enough of one-pot meals lately, because as much as I love eating, I hate doing dishes. One pot I can handle! This recipe is a fun twist on your typical Italian pasta dish, with a tomato sauce made creamy using Parmesan and cream cheese. I also added chicken and spinach to bulk it up and make it more filling, and the end result is creamy, comfort food perfection. My whole family loved this dish, and I’ll definitely be making it again soon! Each 1 & 1/3 cup serving is filling, flavorful, and just 420 calories or 8 WW Points! To view your current WW Points for this recipe and track it in the WW app or site, click here!
I was able to put this recipe together using all ingredients I already had on hand in my pantry or refrigerator, which is always a huge plus! Since some ingredients are hard to come by these days, feel free to make this recipe your own with what you have. Canned diced tomatoes or crushed tomatoes instead of tomato sauce? Sure! Frozen spinach instead of fresh? No problem, just defrost and squeeze it out first. Ground meats or sausage instead of chicken? Yum! Feel free to experiment with what you have in your own home, you might just love it!
Looking for more tasty one-pot comfort food recipes like this One-Pot Creamy Tomato Pasta with Chicken and Spinach? Check out my One-Pot Turkey and Veggie Spaghetti, One-Pot Cheesy Chili Mac, One-Pot Cajun Chicken and Sausage Pasta, One-Pot Buffalo Chicken Mac and Cheese, Lemon Garlic Chicken and Beans Skillet, One-Pot Creamy Garlic Chicken Pasta, One-Pot Spicy Dirty Rice with Chicken and Sausage, Spanish Chicken and Rice Skillet, White Chicken Chili, Turkey Sloppy Joe Pasta, Chicken Pot Pasta, Beef Enchilada Pasta Skillet, Mexican Chicken Cauliflower Rice Skillet, and so many more in the One-Pot Meals category of my recipe index!
One-Pot Creamy Tomato Pasta with Chicken and Spinach
Ingredients
- 1 tablespoon + 1 teaspoon olive oil, divided
- 1 lb raw boneless skinless chicken breast, cut into bite-sized chunks
- 1 small onion, chopped
- 2 garlic cloves, minced
- 3 cups low sodium chicken broth
- 1 (15 oz) can tomato sauce
- 2 tablespoons tomato paste
- 2 teaspoons Italian seasoning
- ¼ teaspoon table salt
- ¼ teaspoon black pepper
- 6 oz fresh spinach leaves
- 12 oz dry wheat pasta, medium sized shape (I used rotini, but farfalle, medium shells, etc will work)
- 2 oz 1/3 less fat cream cheese, cut into cubes
- 1 oz grated parmesan cheese
Instructions
- Drizzle 1 tablespoon of the oil in a 5 QT Dutch oven or large pot and bring to medium-high heat. Add the chicken to the hot oil and cook, stirring occasionally, cooked through and browned. Remove the chicken to a side plate and cover with aluminum foil to keep warm.
- Drizzle another teaspoon of oil into the pot and bring down to medium heat. Add the onion and saute, stirring occasionally, until softened and translucent. Add the garlic and cook for another minute. Add the broth, tomato sauce, tomato paste, Italian seasoning, salt and pepper and stir, scraping up any browned bits on the bottom of the pot. Add the spinach leaves and allow them to wilt.
- Add the pasta and stir together. Bring the mixture to a boil and then reduce the heat to low to simmer. Simmer for 12-15 minutes until the pasta is cooked through and has absorbed much of the liquid.
- Remove from heat and stir in the cream cheese and parmesan cheese until melted into the sauce. Return the chicken to the pot and stir into the pasta.
Notes
11 per (1 & 1/3 cup) serving (PP calculated using a Weight Watchers PointsPlus calculator and the nutrition info below) Adapted from Savory Nothings
Yay! I actually have all of these ingredients in the pantry! I hope you know how popular your recipes are – I share and review them with my WW group all the time! Lasagna cupcakes went back into the rotation last week and I had forgotten how delicious they are! Thank you for all your work. I hope you and your family are safe and doing well.
Thank you, that’s so sweet! We are all safe so far, so hopefully that continues. I wish the same to you!
This looks great! Am I missing where you are supposed to add the chicken back into the recipe? Just at the end? Going to make this right now.
Yup! Sorry, I fixed it 🙂
This recipe is so good. Sadly, 11 portions to get the calories/points ‘down’ to a nice number is just so unreasonable if served as the main dinner. For my family 6 to 8 portions is more realistic 🙂
Huh? This recipe serves 6! I’m not sure what you’re looking at.
Can you use frozen spinach?
Sure!
This was delicious! Everyone in the house loved it! Leftovers for days!
I backed off on the Olive oil to just a teaspoon . 4 servings – still 3 purple pts. It is so yummy. I even licked the bowl.. NO shame. This will be my lunch every day for the coming work week. Thanks !!
Delicious recipe! The whole family loved it for dinner tonight! Thank you for sharing this recipe with us .
Can you sub with chickpea pasta? If so how many points do you think that would be?
I’m sure it would depend on what pasta you used and which color plan you are on! If you want to make changes to the recipe you can run it through the recipe builder on WW 🙂
This was super delicious! You need to write a cookbook!
This is one was “ok.” Good for an easy weeknight dinner, but not something I would get too excited about. Followed the recipe exactly, except for the type of noodle. Due to the current Coronavirus situation, I had to use Penne pasta,as that’s all that was available. Maybe a pinch of sugar in the sauce would’ve cut out some of the acidity from using canned tomato sauce and the bitterness from the spinach.
So I wasn’t too sure about this one until it was all done. The acidity of the tomatoes felt really strong until you added the cheeses in and then it all made sense! This was a hit in my house!! I love these one-pot meals since the clean up is so much easier and it’s a great way to make weightwatchers meals family friendly!
So we’ve made this twice, the first time as written, and the second time I forgot to put the chicken in the fridge to thaw (and I’m impatient lol) so we omitted the chicken. Delicious both ways!
I made this for dinner tonight. I just took my first bite. SO, SO GOOD. And I am not even a huge tomato fan.
Would it be wrong to bathe in this? It’s SO GOOD. I just used a tiny bit of olive oil spray so that removed some of the points. And I used Bonza chickpea rotini and it comes in 9 oz boxes so only did 9 oz. Lastly I added more spinach b/c my BF needs iron (going thru chemo). So the entire thing was only 10 points and I could eat the entire thing until I burst!! My BF whose appetite is sporadic, sucked it up like a Hoover!! Great recipe. As are almost all of yours.
Holy moly this is good! The flavors are wonderful!
Yum yum yum! I was craving pasta and this was perfect! Followed recipe exactly and adding the cheese at the end put tot over the top! It was a nice big portion! Thank you for posting such delicious recipes!
I made this last night and it was good. I used shrimp instead of chicken and added mushrooms as well. I did find that it needed about 3/4 cup more broth than the recipe called for. It was a bit too tomato-ee for me. Could have just been the brand of tomato sauce and paste I used. I will say, when I put the nutrition info in the recipe builder, it calculated that it was 11 points on WW Blue plan. Still worth it to me!
Hi Cindy you can’t calculate the points for a recipe using the nutrition information because it will not account for 0 point foods. You have to use the weight watchers recipe builder for that as I did in calculating the points!
Alright, we had this last night and it was a 10 out of freaking 10! I didn’t have the usual Italian seasoning so I used tarragon and let me tell ya, we were damn near licking our plates clean. My husband and I literally fought over the leftovers today. “If this is what healthy food can taste like, then I’m in” he said. Needless to say it’s in my regular rotation…and we made another recipe tonight and again…10/10. I’ll be back to this blog at least once or twice a week.
This is absolutely amazing! I added one extra cup of broth otherwise follow the recipe exactly and I used Delallo whole wheat pasta which is a great brand because you really can’t taste the difference, thanks again for all you do and creating these delicious recipes.