Okay, look. Before we get started, I KNOW there are going to be some connoisseurs out there who sniff indignantly at the idea of an Alfredo sauce that isn’t made with butter and cream and egg yolks and whatever the hell REAL Alfredo sauce is made of. This isn’t intended to be an indulgence that makes your arteries slam shut immediately upon consumption and which requires you to balance the rest of your week by eating nothing but salads and drinking water. This is a LIGHT Alfredo sauce, and it’s tasty enough that you will LIKE it (unless you’re a snob, that’s right I said it!) and it’s relatively light and healthy and won’t make a dent in your diet. Capisce?

It’s also incredibly simple (though you do have to use the blender/ food processor, and those things are a pain in the ass to drag out, and then a pain in the ass to clean, but it’s so worth it.)

Ingredients:

Skim milk (you could use 2% or whole), Neufchatel cheese (you could use regular cream cheese if you want), garlic, salt and pepper, and Parmesan cheese. The original recipe calls for parsley as well, but I hate parsley so we go without.

Throw everything in your blender.

Blend it ’til there are no clumps.

Pour into a saucepan over medium heat and cook for about 10 minutes, until the sauce thickens.

On a side note, I love that pan so very very much. Several years ago, Fred’s father and stepmother gave us a set of Scanpan pots and pans. They are absolutely awesome, and I’m not kidding when I say that I expect I’ll be cooking with those pots and pans for the rest of my life. In fact, if Fred up and leaves me for another woman, I am claiming custody of the Scanpan cookware.

(Which shouldn’t bother Fred anyway, because I’m sure that whore can’t cook.)

Anyway, a few months ago Fred’s father and stepmother got a new stove, one of those ones that boils water in 30 seconds and requires special pots and pans. Fred’s father called and asked if we wanted any of their Scanpan cookware. Fred jauntily replied “No, we’re good” and then hung up and told me what his father had asked.

You better bet your ass that he called his father back immediately and told him that he’d misspoken. One of the pieces we got from them was this deep pan (which we didn’t already have, because it wasn’t part of the set they gave us initially), and I love it so much that I’m thinking of marrying it. It is beyond awesome.

See? Getting thicker. (If you’re using parsley, you’d add most of it to the sauce at this point, and save some for garnish afterward.)

Meanwhile, prepare your meat. I always use this Alfredo sauce with shrimp and angel hair (because that’s the kind of pasta we always have on hand). If you’re using chicken, you can cook the chicken in the sauce, but with seafood you’ll want to cook it separately.

This is how thick I like my Alfredo sauce. I imagine you could keep going if you wanted it thicker. It’s all about personal preferences, y’know.

I cooked my angel hair and shrimp, tossed them together, and then added the Alfredo sauce and mixed.

Don’t be too impressed by my fancy serving dish. I always mix my stuff in a big plastic container because I know we’re going to have leftovers, and why dirty more dishes than I need to?

I use two pounds of shrimp and half a pound of angel hair with the Alfredo sauce, and it works out perfectly.