If you’re the kind of parent who has successfully sneaked vegetables into the food you serve to your kids, I salute you. I am neither clever nor energetic enough to pull off this feat.

My son, though? Too clever for his own good. My halfhearted attempts at benign culinary subterfuge have not succeeded, and, frankly, I’m okay with that. I’d rather he be fully aware of the vegetables he’s eating that he can appreciate on their own, which is why most days you’ll find me setting a dish of roasted, raw or barely steamed vegetables on the table with dinner. Broccolini, broccoli, corn, tomatoes, cucumbers, green beans and asparagus are all safe bets — for now, anyway.

My earliest and most successful endeavor at integrating vegetables in a more palatable manner was kale pesto. I started making it when my son was a toddler. He ate it for a while, and then I got the feeling — or he told me — that something was not tasting right. The kale was coming on too strong, as it tends to do when featured raw in large amounts. As much as I love cruciferous vegetables, including kale, I had to admit that it had a way of overpowering just about everything else in the dish, especially the basil.

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Get the recipe: Spinach Pesto Pasta

What could I use instead? Baby spinach was the obvious answer. Nutritionally speaking, the two greens are not identical. Kale is higher in certain essential minerals and vitamins, including calcium and vitamin C, but considering the amount of dairy and citrus consumed in our house, I wasn’t concerned. Spinach is still packed with lots of good stuff, especially potassium and vitamin A. Crucially, it breaks down to almost nothing, volume-wise, when run through the food processor, meaning I could use a lot of it to pack as much as possible into my pesto. In fact, the formula I settled on uses almost twice as much spinach as basil.

Baby spinach has plenty of other advantages. It comes prewashed and ready to use, unlike the bunches of kale I typically buy that require stemming and a trip through the salad spinner. It ends up preserving the green color even better than basil alone, which is prone to darkening almost immediately. And, most importantly, spinach’s mellow flavor doesn’t mask the basil at all. You’d be hard-pressed to know there was even spinach in there — although, yes, I have told my son about it!

The rest of the pesto is fairly standard. Pecans are my nut of choice, walnuts my second pick, though you can choose whatever nut or seed you like. Olive oil enriches and pulls together the mix, while salt, pepper and lemon juice sharpen and brighten the flavors. I leave cheese out of the pesto itself, preferring to save it for an optional garnish. (Again, there are no cheese deficiencies in our house.) But feel free to blend grated parmesan into the pesto, if you prefer. I like to use a short, curly pasta shape, such as rotini, fusilli or cascatelli, so the pesto settles between all the ridges. And I’d encourage you to go with bronze-cut pasta, whose extra starchiness helps the pesto cling even better.

Even beyond the appealing helping of greens, this recipe has one other huge family-friendly advantage: It makes a lot, and it stores well. You’ll end up with about 2 cups of pesto, enough for 2 pounds of dried pasta. I’ve written the recipe so that you use half the pesto now and save the rest in the freezer for another time. Of course, you can break this up however you need. I often freeze smaller portions of pesto in squat deli containers to use on 8 ounces of pasta, which is enough to get my son through a few days of dinners or, more often, lunches for school. The finished dish — nicknamed “green pasta” among my family — lasts for several days in the refrigerator as well.

A recipe that’s fast (30 minutes!), easy, make-ahead, tasty and full of greens? I’d call that a parenting win.

Get the recipe: Spinach Pesto Pasta

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