Baked Squash & Goat Cheese Pasta w/ Giada De Laurentiis | Giada's Holiday Handbook | Food Network

Baked pinda with squash and goat cheese. I've got a little bit of butter and shallots here and I want to add a little bit of salt to the shallots and we're going to spice this up ever so slightly with some red pepper flakes. We're going to make a bechamel. What we want to do is add a little bit of flour, about a quarter cup of flour, and we want to sort of cook the flour. So this is what the French call a roux, which is butter and flour. It's the thickener for the white cream sauce, I add four cups of whole milk. So this bechamel, this white cream sauce, it needs the fat from the milk. So it's best that you use whole milk if possible. So you want to make sure that the milk is room temperature. What you don't want is cold milk out of the fridge because it seizes up and then you don't get a nice smooth mixture from your bechamel. While I wait for that to thicken slightly, I'm going to start with my delicata squash. I think it's very sort of holiday and fall and it's not so big and it's not so hard to cut through. You know, butternut squash is awesome and I love it, but it can be a little more labor intensive because you got to peel it and do all of that. So what we want to do is just take the seeds out from the center. See, it's so much easier to clean and work with. And what I love is that you just take it and then you can just slice it into half moons and it just sort of melts and it's so yummy. We're going to start adding our mozzarella and we're going to add about a cup of the mozzarella and then the rest of the mozzarella we're going to hold on to it because we're going to sprinkle it on top of the dish. So about a cup. We'll leave the rest of the mozzarella here and we're going to also add the goat cheese. And what I love, the goat cheese is nice and tangy and tart and so it's going to work really well in here. And we're going to use about eight ounces of the goat cheese. Just melt the two cheeses in here. Goat cheese is melted. Let's take a look at the pasta, just see if it's cooked. One more minute. Meantime, let's add the squash into the cream sauce right there. It'll start to cook and then it'll finish cooking in the oven. Love it. Make sure it's covered in there. Okay, so now let's add the pasta. So we've got our penne and we're just going to add the penne right in there. And we're going to hold on to this pasta water because we're going to cook the broccoli rabe in it too. I'm going to grab about a pound of broccoli rabe and I just washed it and chopped it up. Something else that would work well in here too would be spinach. All right, we're just going to blanch it for a minute to give it a head start. In the meantime, we're going to add some parmigiano right on top here. That way it's easier for the cream sauce to stick to the pasta. Okay, mix that right in. That's mixed. Time for the broccoli rabe. I just love it in here and look how pretty that looks. Vibrant. Okay, so let's toss it all together. Just want to make sure that all of the squash and the broccoli rabe are evenly dispersed in the pan because we're going to bake this guy in here. We're going to finish it with the leftover mozzarella, shredded mozz right over the top and crunchy topping that I love right here. So we've got a half a cup of panko, which is just a very dry sort of bread crumb, and some olive oil. There we go. Just kind of mix that all together and you just sprinkle it right over the top. And just because I can, I'm gonna add a little more cheese to the top. We're gonna pop this in a 400 degree oven for about 25 minutes until the top is golden brown and it's all bubbly.