This is What I Cooked Last Night- Spaghetti 3 Ways

My neighbor is down for the count with a nasty flu, and I have another friend who just had a precious little baby 4 weeks ago...people need food! In the South, where I'm from, people bring you dinner if you even look funny.  Does your dog have fleas?  Well, bless your heart here's a casserole.  But I'll never forget some of the weird things people would bring, my goodness.  There was a porkchop and lima bean concoction that haunts me to this very day.  Ugggggh!  So.....

Since both families have 2 young children, I went with the kid staple- SPAGHETTI!  (And you know I'm not making something different for my boys, oh no.)  So one family got spaghetti and meatballs, the other one baked spaghetti pie, and our family stuck with the traditional bolognese sauce.  Let's get started!

Big ol' pot of sauce coming up:

Let me start my first cooking post by saying that I'm a firm follower of the 'work with what you have' philosophy.  If I don't have something, I figure out something else.  For years I have used the Silver Palate Quick Tomato Sauce recipe.  I don't work with exact measurements, I wing it.  If you have tomatoes, great!  Use a bunch.  I didn't, so I used 5 16oz cans of tomato sauce.

Chop a big onion.

I have to make a confession before you see the next embarrassing picture.  I really HATE onions.  For years and years I omitted them from any and every recipe.  Onion rings?  Hold the onions, please.  But I figured out a few years ago that in many many recipes they truly take the dish from good to great.  So my picky self picked up a Magic Bullet and I blend those bad boys into onion soup.

Heat up a 1/2 cup or so of extra virgin olive oil, throw in a heaping spoon of garlic (I am so heavy handed with the garlic, these poor children) and then toss in the onion soup!

Add pureed tomatoes, or in my case, cans of tomato sauce.  Hey, I don't even like fresh tomatoes, I only like canned.  I know!

Chop up a fistfull of fresh basil (fresh herbs make everything better).

Throw the basil in the sauce with a few very healthy shakes of dried thyme, and 3 big drips of Balsamic vinegar (Balsamic is capitalized because it is THAT important to me.  It is my ranch dressing of pantry liquids).  And your sauce is done.  Unless you are only cooking for adults in which case you should shake some crushed red pepper flakes and some cayenne in there as well.  Have some Siracha?  Just do it, friend.  Let your sauce simmer anywhere from an hour to all day long.

Got 2/3 of my lean ground beef on to brown.  We almost always use turkey in everything, but some people are weird about that, so it's beef when cooking for others.

It's done and drained. 

 

Now let's start on the meatballs!  I love this baked meatballs recipe.  I did not use garlic (since I loaded the sauce with it) or salt.  Meat and cheese are salty, let's not overdue it.  Oh also, I found this Mario Batali cheese blend at Sam's and really wanted to try it, so I used that instead of just parmesan.

Can I just talk about this bowl for a second?  It's a commercial sized stainless steel bowl that I bought years ago and I use it to mix everything.  It is so big it doesn't fit anywhere in my kitchen so it sits randomly on top of my cabinets like a gleaming eyesore.  But I loves it.

Mix. Make meatballs.

Bake!  At 425 degrees for 15 minutes.

MMMMMM, yes please.

Boiled noodles (I like the Barilla Plus Whole Grain Thin Spaghetti. I don't know how they get the extra fiber, protein and folic acid in there, but good job) and drained.

Now let's mix up Baked Spaghetti Pie.  I kinda use this recipe from Paula Deen. But I think cheddar is weird with spaghetti so I continued using the Batali Italian blend.  I mixed the browned ground beef with lots of sauce and layered meatsauce, noodles, cheese, repeat until I ended with a third layer of sauce.  Usually when recipes call for additional cheese on top, there is already plenty of cheese inside the dish so I eliminate it.  You don't have to, go nuts.

Disposable baking pans are portable, recyclable, and you don't leave your good baking dishes all over town.  Everybody wins!

This should bake at 350 for 35 minutes, but I'm letting my sweet friend decide whether she wants to bake it for dinner tonight or freeze it for a frazzled day.

Baked Spaghetti pie and meatballs, sauce and noodles packed up and ready.  Let's throw together a salad with whatever I have in the refrigerator.

Spinach, spring mix, strawberries, apples and feta cheese. See that chopper blade deal?  It rules.  I chop everything like those pros at the food court salad place at the mall.

Toss the rest of the beef and sauce and pour over noodles for my family.

Baylor says....

YUMMMM

Mmmmmy!