Spaghetti is a versatile dish that’s always sure to please. Cooks can change the standard sauce recipe in multiple ways—with meat or without, with vegetables or without—but even the most ardent spaghetti fans can crave new and interesting ways to cook this classic dinner favorite. The recipe below expands the traditional spaghetti recipe beyond simply ladling sauce over noodles, but still leaves cooks plenty of room to experiment with a variety of sauce ingredients.
Spaghetti Casserole Recipe
Ingredients:
- 8 ounces spaghetti
- 8 ounces spaghetti sauce
- 2 eggs
- ½ cup grated parmesan cheese
- 2 tablespoons butter
- Salt to taste
- 4 ounces shredded mozzarella cheese
- 1 tablespoon oregano
Directions:
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees
- Grease an 11x7 casserole dish with non-stick cooking spray or butter
- Cook spaghetti noodles until just tender and drain. Return noodles to cooking pot.
- Beat 2 eggs well. Add eggs to spaghetti and stir, making sure eggs fully coat spaghetti noodles.
- Add 2 tablespoons butter, ½ cup parmesan cheese, and salt to noodle and egg mixture. Stir well
- Pour noodle mixture into casserole dish. Using fingers or a spoon, make sure that the noodles fully cover the bottom of the dish. Push an approximately ¼ inch layer of noodles up on the sides of the dish slightly, as if making an outer border (Think pizza crust)
- Ladle spaghetti sauce over the surface of the noodles, leaving the approximate ¼ inch border of noodles around the edge of the casserole dish
- Sprinkle 4 ounces of shredded mozzarella cheese evenly over the sauce
- Sprinkle 1 tablespoon oregano evenly over the mozzarella cheese
- Bake uncovered for 25-30 minutes. The mozzarella cheese and spaghetti sauce should be bubbly
- Remove from oven. Cut into squares and serve (Cutting the casserole into 3 inch squares should yield approximately 6-8 servings).
Recipe Variations
Cooks can feel free to be just as creative with the sauce for spaghetti casserole as they would with sauces for a traditional spaghetti recipe. Adding meat or vegetables to the sauce would obviously make for a more hearty casserole (and cooks might want to cut the servings into smaller squares—generating more servings—in that case), and any commercially available canned spaghetti sauce will make this casserole work.
As this casserole does resemble a sort of lasagna without lasagna noodles, cooks can make this dish even more lasagna-like by adding a shallow layer of ricotta, cottage, or other cheese mixture to this dish between the spaghetti noodle and sauce layers. The cook time for this recipe variation will remain unchanged.
The traditional spaghetti dinner doesn’t have to be the same old, same old. By adding just a few additional ingredients and a casserole dish, cooks can put a new twist on an old favorite that’s sure to please.
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