Easy Cheesy Baked Pasta Recipe
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Quick, easy, and endlessly customizable, this weeknight warrior of a recipe is sure to be a fan favorite at your dinner table. This meal takes around 30 minutes from pantry to plate and is leftover-friendly!
- Prep Time: 10
- Cook Time: 30
- Total Time: 40 minutes
- Yield: 6 1x
- Category: Dinner
- Method: Baked
- Cuisine: Italian
Ingredients
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 pound ground meat or meat based alternative
1 (12-ounce) package pasta, gluten free if desired
2 cups broccoli florets
2 cups Evy's Garden Marinara Sauce (pg. 88 of Damn Good Gluten Free) or your favorite homemade or store bought marinara sauce.
1/2 cup shredded Italian cheese blend
1/2 - 1 teaspoon Calabrian chile flakes, if you like it spicy.
Instructions
Preheat the oven to 350F
In a large preheated skillet add the olive oil and ground meat. Cook for 3-5 minutes until the meat is no longer pink. Set aside.
Cook the pasta according to the package directions, aiming for al dente.
In the final 3 minutes of the pasta's cook time add the broccoli directly in to the pasta pot.
Once the 3 minutes are up, drain the pasta and broccoli, reserving 1 tablespoon of the cooking water.
Pour the pasta, broccoli, and cooking water into a 9"x 13" glass baking dish. Then mix in the marinara sauce and cooked meat if using. If you are opting to make the Cheesy Baked Pasta dish spicy mix in the Calabrian chile flakes now.
Top with shredded cheese.
Bake for 20-30 minutes until light brown and bubbly.
Broil under the broiler for 1-2 minutes if needed.
Notes
See details in our blog post for the many recipe variations for this recipe.
How I personally bake and serve Peggy's Cheesy Baked Pasta recipe:
When I make this for our house, which includes gluten free, meat lovers, and vegetarians, I combine all of the ingredients through the marinara sauce. Mix well. Then I divide the mixture as needed between two smaller glass baking dishes. Then I can mix the meat into one of them and leave the other veggie based.
We received permission from Peggy Curry of Curry Girl's Kitchen to share this recipe.
Nutrition
- Serving Size: 1 generous scoop
- Calories: 423
- Sugar: 6.4 g
- Sodium: 520.1 mg
- Fat: 11.1 g
- Carbohydrates: 51.4 g
- Protein: 28.4 g
- Cholesterol: 52.7 mg
Find it online: https://thismessisours.com/cheesy-baked-pasta-recipe/
