New Recipe 2/52: Baked Spaghetti

This is another recipe I got from the allrecipes website.  I have also seen Paula Deen make a version of it.

Ingredients:
1 lb spaghetti, 1 jar spaghetti sauce plus one can tomato sauce, shredded italian blend cheese, 1 lb pork sausage, 1 clove garlic, parmesan cheese, italian seasoning, salt n pepper, 16 oz cottage cheese, 1 zucchini, 1 small onion, 1 can mushrooms, 2 eggs, 5 tbsp melted butter.

Slice the zucchini, chop onion as fine as you like, chop th garlic fine.  Toss them all in a pan with a little olive oil.  Add the meat, let it get brown.  Drain fat/grease.  At the same time, get water bioling for your pasta.  When your meat is cooked and drained, add the mushrooms, tomato sauce/spaghetti sauce, season with some salt/pepper, italian seasoning, etc, and heat up.  In a small bowl, mix the melted butter with (beaten) eggs and about 1/3 cup parmesan cheese.  Drain your pasta and toss with the egg mixture.  In a 9x13 pan, layer as follows: a little bit of sauce, half of spaghetti noodles, half of cottage cheese, half of sauce, shredded cheese.  Repeat layers.

Cover with tinfoil, bake at 350 for about 40 minutes.  Remove tinfoil, bake for an additional 20 minutes till cheese is nice and melty.

I served this with garlic bread.  The taste was great.  I love italian food.  However this was not terribly different than your regular spaghetti with meat sauce.  The baking process made the pasta and sauce bind together more than it normally would, but when we reheated leftovers it pretty much fell apart.  not that it didn't still taste good, it just was a lot of extra work to end up with spaghetti with meat sauce.  Also, this made  A LOT of food.  The casserole dish was HEAVY.  I mean, you add it all up and we are looking at about 5 lbs of food.  When my kids are older and are eating me out of house and home that will be one thing, but right now they don't eat that much.  I gave a big dish of leftovers to my brother and we were still eating it for 2 more days!  this would be a really good dish to make if you were going to a potluck of some sort, or if you are having a bunch of people over for dinner.  Then it's like portable spaghetti!!

The cool thing about this dish though is just like spaghetti sauce you can make it your own.  Do peppers instead of zucchini, skip the onion, add more garlic, whatever you like.  Normally when I do spaghetti I doa jar of ready-made sauce and then add some plain tomato sauce and season it up with extra spices/seasonings.