Mary J. McCoy-Dressel

Week 49: The Best Dish I Cook.

December is upon us. The year and Marketing for Romance Writers 52-Week Blog Challenge is counting down. Hmm. About this week… I don’t only have one best dish, so how do I proceed? Of course, I’ll use a dish and meal from happy moments in my life. What’s better than food, family, & memories. Does it matter if it isn’t my own creation? This year I’m posting a recipe for Meaty Macaroni Bake.

Meaty Macaroni Bake is great for crowds. This is a #recipe my sister-in-law and/or I would cook when our families got together. We had five kids between us–her three, my two. Include our husbands and usually a single brother-in-law and we were ready to sit down for dinner.

We’d fix a green salad and often have the Pineapple Sheet Cake for dessert. When my family visited my in-laws in Pennsylvania, we’d always get a red devil’s food cake from Isaly’s because we couldn’t get that here then. Another thing we’d have to have while there was a Klondike ice cream bar because they weren’t available here, either.

Let’s get going:

*Meaty Macaroni Bake

1-pound ground beef
½ cup chopped onion
1 16-ounce jar spicy spaghetti sauce. (I never use spicy.) I always swish a little water around in the jar to get all the bits then add to the mixture to thin a little.
1 4-ounce can mushroom pieces, drained
6 ounces elbow macaroni, divided
1 cup sour cream, divided
4 ounces provolone cheese, sliced
4 ounces mozzarella cheese, shredded

Serves 6. It’s been so long, but I’m sure we had to double this recipe with the hungry bellies we fed.

I was lucky to find this image on Pixabay that resembles my dish. We didn’t add the garnish, but it does make it pretty.

Pixabay Image

Instructions:
1. Heat a large skillet over medium-high heat; add beef. Cook, stirring until brown and crumbly; about 5 minutes. Drain fat.
2. Add onion to skillet; cook for 2 minutes. Stir spaghetti sauce and mushrooms into skillet. Simmer, covered for 5 minutes. Cook pasta according to directions. Drain.
3. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Spray a baking dish with cooking spray. Layer half the pasta, half the sauce and half the sour cream in prepared baking dish. Layer PROVOLONE cheese slices over the top.
4. Continue layering remaining pasta, sauce, and sour cream. Top with MOZZARELLA. Cover loosely with foil sprayed with cooking spray. Bake for 25 minutes. Uncover. Bake for another 5 minutes. Remove and let stand about ten minutes if you can wait that long.
5. Enjoy!

I hope your family enjoys this recipe as much as mine did.

Remember, this is a Blog Hop. Can’t wait to see the other recipes.

*My sister-in-law has since passed away. We’ve had this recipe well over twenty years, and I don’t know where she found it, so I don’t know who to credit. If this infringes upon someone’s copyright, contact me, and I’ll be happy to remove it from my blog. I found a similar recipe HERE using a few extra ingredients.

Let me know how you like this if you make it and if you varied the ingredients. Thanks! Enjoy your weekend.