Making fun of vegetarians and vegans is sort of a hobby of mine. Not out of spite, necessarily, but more a target of opportunity sort of thing. I mean, there are just so many good jokes for vegetarians ("There's room for all of God's creatures...right next to the mashed potatoes" "Don't get me wrong, I love animals, I just love to eat them more.") and I just seem to keep meeting them. In fact, Jeni is a former (recovering? current?) vegetarian and was probably on the receiving end of many of these fine quips.

But to be honest, the other day I just felt like I was getting tired of eating meat. I mean, look at all the things I've made on the blog: meat galore. And normally this is not a problem for me: Man like meat. But when I came across this recipe for baked vegetarian pasta, I was oddly intrigued and felt suddenly compelled to make and eat it.




The Original Recipe Link

The original is a recipe by Giada DiLaurentis from the Food Network (you know, the pretty one with the abnormally large head?). The problem with using the Food Network website and subsequently following all the recipes for these famous chefs is the ability to obtain their fanciful ingredients and the cost of buying those fanciful ingredients. Also, there's personal preference and taste, etc, so I slightly modified this recipe as such:

2 red bell peppers
3 small green Italian squash
3 small yellow squash
1 Portobello mushroom
1 yellow onion
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
1 teaspoon salt, divided
1 teaspoon black ground pepper, divided
1 tablespoon herbes de Provence
1 pound penne pasta
1 jar Newman's Own marinara
2 cups of grated mozzarella
lots of parmesan (whatever was left in our bag)

This is a good recipe, but it does take some time: if you want to use this for a "quick night" meal you could slice up your ingredients ahead of time, I suppose, but the two-phase cooking does take some time.

Anyway, start chopping the vegetables and throw onto pan. The recipe says 1 in strips, I made 1 inch square-ish chunks. I suppose that's what they meant and not long inch wide strips, but interpret as you will. Put on your olive oil, half of your salt and pepper and the Herbes de Provence and mix it up. Megan wanted to help with this recipe so she did some chopping and then mixed the veggies and pepper with her hands. Throw this into the oven at 450 for about 15 minutes.

You also need to cook your penne for about 6 minutes. It takes about 12 minutes I realize now for our pot to come to a boil, so you may want to start that off while you're chopping, depending on your stove (Oh what I would do for that super-stove that brings water to a boil in 90 seconds...). Throw penne in, cook. It should be pretty hard still when you take it out; it gets cooked the rest of the way through in the oven.

If the veggies are tender (not too soft) after 15 min, take it out. Put veggies, penne, cheese and sauce into your largest mixing bowl and mix together very slowly with a wooden spoon (Megan did this part too!) then put into a greased 9x13 pan. Save part of your Parmesan to spread on top of the thing after you've poured it into the pan so you can have a nice cheesy top (pictured above).

Bake for 25 minutes. I've finally learned that our oven is way super hot, so we only baked it for 15 and it came out perfectly.

The dish is amazing. The vegetables are soft but have a slight crunch, the pasta gets soft, the cheese is melty (and crunchy on the top layer) and it's very filling. So far it's Megan's favorite meal I've made.

It should be noted that this recipe is for 6 servings so I suppose you could cut down everything and do it in a 8x6 for smaller meals, or you can have leftovers (Megan will be eating it for lunch and dinner for a while). It would also make a good entertaining dish, I think.

So vegetarians, you get a reprieve; you can eat delicious satisfying meals without having to kill a furry thing.

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Later this week: I'll be doing a Lemon Greek Chicken for Wednesday, so that's cool. But I'm excited for Friday: AJ and Rachelle are coming over and AJ and I are going to do...something! We haven't decided yet but with the powers of Price and Ing combined the results can only be amazing.

What do you think?: I'm thinking about starting blog out the cost of the ingredients I use. The news keeps talking about the rising cost of food in America and I'm curious to see how accurate they are. Fair readers, would you find this interesting?