Red Pepper Pasta Bake
A quick and easy cheesy pasta bake that the whole family will love!
Remember those pumpkin doughnut muffins I posted the other day? Well, the batch made 15 muffins and I shoved 3 in my mouth before my photo shoot but I regretfully asked Jason to bring the leftovers to school so I wouldn’t be tempted to eat the remaining 12. So when I asked him how the cupcakes went over with his friends, this is how our conversation went:
I feel like this is what happens when you don’t have children and your job is to stay at home and cook all day. It also gets better. Later that night, he told me that everyone in his thesis class had a muffin including his professor! Had I known that the professor was going to eat my baked good, I would’ve made some sort of creme brûlée-/macaron type masterpiece! Anyway, I just had to share my overbearing mom qualities.
Now about this pasta.
It’s a fun spin on the traditional pasta bake but instead of using marinara sauce, I’ve used a red pepper sauce that comes together so quickly and easily with the help of my food processor. You can also add in your favorite protein or keep it meatless – either way, this cheesy goodness is so easy to make and everyone will be begging for seconds!
Red Pepper Pasta Bake
Ingredients
- 6 ounces penne pasta
- 1 12-ounce jar roasted red peppers
- ½ cup grated Parmesan
- 2 teaspoons honey
- ½ teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes, or more, to taste
- Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste
- 3 tablespoons olive oil, divded
- 2 cloves garlic, minced
- 8 ounces spicy Italian sausage, casings removed
- 1 ½ cups shredded mozzarella cheese
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. Lightly coat an 8×8 baking dish with nonstick spray.
- In a large pot of boiling salted water, cook pasta according to package instructions; drain well.
- To make the red pepper sauce, combine red peppers, Parmesan, honey and red pepper flakes in the bowl of a food processor; season with salt and pepper, to taste. With the motor running, add 2 tablespoons olive oil in a slow stream until emulsified; set aside.
- Heat remaining 1 tablespoon olive oil in a large skillet over medium high heat. Add garlic and cook, stirring frequently, until fragrant, about 1-2 minutes. Add sausage and cook until browned, about 5 minutes, making sure to crumble the sausage as it cooks. Stir in pasta and red pepper mixture until well combined.
- Add pasta to prepared baking dish and top with mozzarella. Place into oven and bake until cheese has melted, about 5-10 minutes.
- Serve immediately.
Did you make this recipe?
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This looks so good that I seriously wish I had it for breakfast right now!
Trust me, I do the same thing! Gotta get the food in peoples mouths before it goes bad…or I eat it all! 🙂
Love this pasta! Red peppers are my favorite!
I do this exact same thing, I send my mum to work with cakes and cookies, macarons; you name it. Just to get it out of the house and away from my mouth!
She is a nurse at a hospital and she share it with the doctors and patients too. They always ask her “Do you have any food for us today?”
Love the red pepper sauce on this pasta bake, I am addicted to jar peppers now (I used to have to roast them myself before I discovered them)
Sometimes I give food to my hubs/daughter in a lunch sack like to take to the park and they wind up sharing it with others. It’s like had I known others were going to eat it, i would have doctored it up a little better. But honestly I think anything homemade (for the avg non-blogger) is a super special treat. And your muffins looked amazing!
“Doctored it up” – that’s the perfect way to put it!