Friday, January 4, 2013

The Lunch Hour - Rigatoni

When I was living with the girls (Kari, Martha, and Tabitha) we had a very interesting eating style, which was large stacks of soda with maybe a side of chocolate bars. Sometimes we would actually cook, and we would greatly enjoy those times, but it was very hard to try to balance everything while working and attending Cal Poly. In hind sight, I think more cooked home meals would have helped all of us ground and help each other out. One such dish was created by Kari. She said that her family used to make baked rigatoni all the time as a quick dish. For some reason her recipe stuck with me and I occassionaly find myself making it as a quick meal that takes minimal work.

Today I walked down to the little local Cookie Crock Market and could not decide on what to have for lunch so I grabbed a bag of noodles, some tomato sauce, and some cheese. Honestly, the recipe just includes mixing everything and putting it in to bake. The office smelled of lovely pasta, making my co-workers sneak into the kitchen to get some rigatoni throughout the afternoon. I made the little toaster oven pan's worth of pasta so I had extra to bring home for Ivan.

Ingredients:

Uncooked pasta to fill your desired pan
Enough tomato sauce/spaghetti sauce to coat all the noodles plus extra
Cheese

In this example I used a medium sized bag of rigatoni noodles, one large container of tomato/basil sauce, and a tub of romano, asiago, and parmesan cheese. I think in college we used to put mozzarella cheese because we liked the melty, stringy type of pasta. 

Preheat toaster oven to 350 degrees F. Place your noodles in your tin/pan and coat with sauce. I added about a 1/2 cup of water to the empty glass jar and shook it to get all the tomato sauce out and then poured it over the noodles. Place in toaster oven for about 15 minutes. At this time mix the pasta a bit more to get the bottom done pasta to mix around and to give the toasty top pasta a little more moisture. At this point sprinkle the cheese on top and place back into the toaster oven for another 15 minutes. This will allow the top noodles to crisp up and the cheese to get all melty. Let it cool a little and then enjoy.

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