How to Make Four Cheese Baked Penne

Healthy Appetite

The challenge, cook in advance for a crowd and keep it healthy. The solution, Four Cheese Baked Penne.

Starting with an onion, medium onion, I diced up, sautéing it in two teaspoons of olive oil, four cloves of garlic and I always get the onion going before I add the garlic, I don’t want the garlic to burn. Okay and this is ready to add some tomato. Then I’m going to add a can of crushed tomatoes. No salt added if you can find it. And then eight ounces of no salt added tomato sauce and this is a great shortcut ingredient. It’s kind of just all, beautifully thick and pureed, doesn’t need much cooking at all. I’m going to add some fantastic flavorings to it. A teaspoon of dried oregano, classic Italian taste, a teaspoon of dried rosemary, half a teaspoon of crushed red pepper, it doesn’t really register as heat with that little amount. Okay this just needs a simmer for 10 minutes. While that’s going. I’m going to grab my cheeses.

A low-fat, small-curd cottage cheese, I need one and a half cup and this is just loaded with calcium and high in protein with very little fat. Next up, some ricotta cheese, part-skim and this saves 40% of the fat over whole milk ricotta and you get all of the creaminess, nothing artificial, and then I need mozzarella, a part-skim mozzarella. So I need about one and a quarter cups. I’m just going to put about a half cup in here. Save the rest for on top.

Like so, give it a stir and the heat can come off at this point. Just a matter of combining everything then getting it into a baking dish. Okay, the cheese goes in, this is where it gets good. And in it goes, slide it in. How beautiful is this? So the great thing about this is that you can cover it and stash it in the fridge for whenever you’re ready for it or you can bake it right away. And I’m going to bake it now at 400 for 30 minutes. How good does this look?


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