Combine readily available kitchen ingredients for this hearty pasta meal.
Pasta dishes are a perennial favourite. This one has a few unusual additions, most notably the brown sugar, and makes a delightful alternative to your favourite spaghetti dish.
This makes a large batch; freeze half – before baking - for future use.
Ingredients
2 pounds lean ground beef
1 large onion, chopped
½ red bell pepper, chopped
½ green bell pepper, chopped
1-28 ounce can diced tomatoes
1-10 ounce can mushrooms, pieces & stems
1-28 ounce can tomato sauce
¼ cup brown sugar
¼ cup Worcestershire sauce
½ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon pepper
2-10 ounce cans of condensed mushroom & onion soup
4 cups cheddar cheese, grated
8 cups cooked spaghetti
Method:
- Brown ground beef in Dutch oven.
- Add chopped onion and peppers to ground beef. Continue to cook until onions are transparent.
- Add diced tomatoes, tomato sauce, drained mushrooms and bring to slow boil.
- Add brown sugar, Worcestershire sauce, salt and pepper. Simmer for 30 minutes or until sauce is thick.
- Spread 1/2 cooked pasta into bottom of 9x13 cake pan. (Repeat for freezer batch.)
- Spread 1 can of mushroom & onion soup over the pasta. (Repeat for freezer batch.)
- Pour ½ tomato sauce over the mushroom & onion soup. (Repeat for freezer batch.)
- Top with 2 cups grated cheese. (Repeat for freezer batch.)
- Bake one batch at 356’Fahrenheit for 50 minutes; freeze the second batch.
Cook's Notes
Substitutions:
This dish lends itself remarkably to your pantry and your imagination. Orange or yellow bell peppers make a colourful substitution (or addition) to the red and green peppers listed. Crushed tomatoes work as well as diced, although the diced tomatoes are a nice shape and texture change. Instead of Mushroom & Onion soup, try Cream of Mushroom, Mushroom & Garlic, or Golden Mushroom Soup.
Just about any type of pasta works in this dish, although we've called it Spaghetti Supreme. Multi-coloured pasta adds to the look of this meal, as does using a variety of pasta shapes and sizes.
Flavoured pastas, like commercially available Catelli sun-dried tomato and basil spaghettini or cracked black pepper fettucini, up the flavour of this dish.
Cut Calories:
If you want to reduce the caloric content of this dish replace regular condensed soup with low fat alternatives. You can also omit the cheese topping. Up the nutritional value by replacing traditional pasta with whole grain alternatives.
Serving Suggestions:
Serve this dish up with sweet corn niblets and a tossed salad.
Did You Know?
In the 1970s, an excavation party found a bottle of Lea and Perrins Worcestershire Sauce buried in the rubble of an 1886 volcanic eruption in New Zealand. Lea and Perrins has been producing commercial Worcestershire Sauce since 1837.
