Katie Lee Biegel's Spaghetti With Clams Is a Simple Dish to Make for Pasta Night

Welcome to The Pioneer Woman Cookbook Club! This month, we're featuring Katie Lee Biegel, chef, Food Network star, and cookbook author of It's Not Complicated: Simple Recipes for Every Day. Read on to find out about food traditions Katie hopes to share with her daughter, her favorite pantry items, and learn how to make her easy Spaghetti with Clams recipe.

Simple recipes are not only delicious, but they can also be the most memorable.

Katie Lee Biegel's latest cookbook, It’s Not Complicated, is filled with no-fuss dishes like Turkey Meatloaf, Lemon Pasta, and Caramelized Onion Burgers that could all easily become new family staples.

For Katie, simple dishes are the best ones. When recalling the inspiration for her book, she mentions a scene in Nancy Meyers’s It’s Complicated—the film that also inspired the title—where Alec Baldwin’s character earnestly proclaims over breakfast that "Mommy is the best cook—in the world."

“My hope is that these recipes become the ones you make over and over again for your family. Just those comfortable recipes that when your kids are older, they’ll say Mommy, you’re the best cook,” she explains.

As a new mom to baby Iris, the Food Network star is conscious of the way memories in the kitchen can stick with us as we grow older. She recalls making biscuits with her grandma, something that she can’t wait to do with Iris one day. She also points to the cookbook's Spaghetti with Zucchini that she and her husband Ryan had at their wedding. It’s become a summertime tradition, hoping that it'll become a favorite of Iris’s too.

“And of course, there are desserts like Whoopie Pies and Miso Chocolate Chip Cookies I think she’ll be having when she comes home from school,” she says, both recipes which you'll find in the book too.

Familiar, easy meals carried Katie through both her pregnancy and the pandemic as The Kitchen star gravitated toward grilled cheese sandwiches, making them the way her grandpa used to with mayonnaise. Pantry recipes also became an easy go-to—her Creamy Spinach Artichoke Pasta became such a popular dish that she made sure to squeeze it into the book.

“I've learned to always keep around ingredients that you can add to change up the flavors. Red curry paste, capers, lemons—things that you can just grab and add a lot of flavor to a dish,” she says.

Even her Spaghetti with Clams can be transformed into a simple pantry dish by swapping fresh clams for canned clams, she points out. While Katie normally makes this dish using littleneck clams caught right from the water behind their house in the Hamptons, the West Virginia native knows that fresh shellfish isn’t always accessible, depending on where you live.

“Clams were certainly something I never ate. As a kid, my grandpa would buy canned oysters and would bread and fry them and that was a real treat,” she says. “When I first moved here, I felt like I didn’t know a lot about seafood, so I got a job in a fish market that was just opening up. That’s how I learned about seafood and how to cook it—just from experimenting.”

Regardless of how you plan on making it, this Spaghetti with Clams is bound to become a family favorite. It’s the perfect summer pasta recipe or easy weeknight dinner!