Almost baked penne pasta, + homemade dinner rolls

When I got home from work, I got busy in the kitchen since I knew my dinner was going to be a little involved. I was planning on making baked penne, with ricotta cheese, mozzarella cheese, my own, sauce, until this happened:

If you can see some nasty mold growing in the right hand corner! Ewww!!! At first I was thinking, maybe its like moldy cheese, I could just scoop it out, but I decided against it. AND the expiration date is in September!

So, on to plan B. I’ll just make my sauce, and layer that with some mozzarella cheese and bake it, so that’s what I did.

I started out with Italian chicken sausage that I bought from Super Target. Each link is only 90 calories, and I used 3 for my sauce. They don’t come in the casing, so I just chopped them up.

Here it is chopped up in my skillet:

Next, I added 2 28 oz. cans of crushed tomatoes, garlic, Italian seasoning, salt and pepper and that’s about it!

So in a big casserole dish, I just added a layer of the penne pasta, some mozzarella cheese, some sauce and then another layer, followed by cheese, the rest of the sauce and then a little more cheese on top!

Here’s how it looked before going into the oven:

And…..after!

Meanwhile, I made dinner rolls from a recipe Heidi from 101 Cookbooks just posted today actually! The only difference is I made it with wheat bran instead of oat bran, and ground flax meal instead of regular flax seed. One tip is after it is baked, slice it in half, and toast it like an English muffin and add some butter. These were very dense and delicious!!

And, while all that was baking, I ran outside to water my topsy turvey tomato plants, still no sign of tomatoes, I’m getting a little scared, but lots of leaves, so we’ll see what happens! My 10 year old son Mark, asked if he could make his own sauce…he doesn’t like it baked. So, I said “Sure!”

When I came back into the kitchen, this is what I saw….

“Ummm…Mark, did you use all those spices in your pasta sauce?”

“Yeah, and can you take a picture of it and post it on your blog with the recipe in case anyone else wants to make it?”

“Of course!” (What’s a Mom to do, right?”)

Here’s the recipe!

1 (14 oz.) can tomato sauce
celery salt
onion powder
ground white pepper
ceyenne pepper
coarse black pepper
lemon pepper
Italian seasoning
Sea salt
freeze dried chives
marjoram!

Phew! It was pretty spicy but he and his sister loved it!

I hope you enjoyed tonight’s cooking bonanza!!!