Happy Friday! I am fully embracing the fall and hitting you with another fall recipe.

This is pasta with a creamy pumpkin marinara sauce. I found this recipe on Cookie & Kate website (link here).

The sauce recipe has the basis of a regular marinara by using onion, bell pepper, crushed tomato, garlic and oregano. But it also has some pumpkin puree (not pie filling) and cinnamon which are what make this sauce more festive. It might sound a little weird to put pumpkin in a tomato sauce but it adds such a nice creaminess and a little earthiness. You should try it if you haven’t.

The recipe says to blend the sauce after it has cooked, but I chose not to. It looked so creamy to me already, I didn’t mind having the little pieces of bell pepper and onion. I will also admit that I got a bit lazy and just didn’t want to dirty the blender for this. I really liked it as is, but I mean, if you have picky children, I would blend the sauce to hide the veggies.

A cool thing about this pasta was that it was actually vegan! It calls for butter, but I used some DF margarine instead. It also says parmesan is an optional garnish so I just skipped that. It’s amazing that there is no dairy in this pasta, considering how creamy the sauce is.

This was such a good pasta. I love the hint of cinnamon and I put a good amount of black pepper at the end for a bit of heat. Also, I chose penne pasta which I think was perfect for this dish because the sauce got into all the little tubes. Such a good fall dinner!

If you want to see another pumpkin-tomato pasta post, check out the Pumpkin Meatballs w/ Cinnamon Sage Tomato Sauce.