Baked Penne Bolognese

My husband loves going to East Side Mario's, free bread and salad, yay! Recently he discovered a new dish, Baked Penne Bolognese! I looked at the ingredients and I thought, hey I could do that, it sounds easy. So last night I decided to try it, and it was a success, my husband even said that it was better than the one's at East Side's!

So when I plan my menu for the week, I try to not have too many things go to waste, and I knew that I wouldn't use my whole can of spaghetti sauce that I had bought to make the lasagna in a cup.

You will need:

pasta of your choice (I would use small tubular pasta, like penne or macaroni or rotini like I did)
spaghetti sauce
alfredo sauce
mozzarella
ground beef (optional)
spices of your choice

So I started by boiling water for my pasta (I thought I had pennes, but I didn't, so I made Rotinis instead), I always add salt to my water, not to make it boil faster, as I think that's a myth but to add a little bit of taste to the pasta.

In the meantime I started cooking my ground beef in very small bits, I don't like chunks (to make bolognese you need meat, but I suppose you could make it vegetarian and forgo the meat). I then added the leftover of my spaghetti sauce, a bit of italian seasonings and then the jar of alfredo sauce (I usually make my own when I want to eat chicken alfredo, but for this I thought the texture of bought would be better and it would be faster). I let it warm up a little.

I then drained my pasta (I like to make my pasta al dente, so a little bit hard still, not too much, just a tad resistant).
I served them in onion soup bowls to make it unique and one serving a bowl. So I put the pasta in the bowls, a little bit of sauce, mixed it, and then a tiny little bit more sauce and then mozzarella cheese on top (to make it baked, but it could be done without). I put it in the oven for maybe 5 minutes at 400 F and then a couple minutes on broil to make it brown a little (this step should be done to your liking).

I served it with cheesy garlic bread (I didn't want to make ceasar salad two nights in a row). I always make my own garlic butter, I find it a waste of money to buy, for 4 slices of bread, I took about 2 Tbsp of butter and two normal size garlic cloves minced (I have a contraption from pampered chef to mince garlic).

And voilà, once again dinner in under 30 minutes! And the bonus is that it made so much sauce that I have enough for two more meals of that, I put them in the freezer!