How to Make Cheesy Baked Spaghetti Casserole (aka Poor Man's Lasagna)

Hi, I'm Aimee. This is House of Nash Eats, and today we are making baked spaghetti casserole. So we're going to start our sauce by first chopping our onion, so that's prepped and ready to go. So I've got one onion, and when I'm chopping an onion, you can always use one of those food choppers, but I like to just slice off the end and then flip it over and slice it in half, and then peel all the papery outside skin off. Okay, now a trick I've learned for chopping onion by hand with a knife is to use a really sharp knife, but then instead of just going straight up and down on your onion, you actually want to slice in at a slight diagonal all the way across the onion, and leaving the root end intact helps hold it together so it doesn't just all fall apart. But when you slice at a slight diagonal, you actually get a more even dice to your onion than when you slice straight up and down. And I'm just going to slice halfway through the middle, and then we just chop it all the way through, and we've got a perfectly evenly chopped onion, and all the pieces are about the same size, which is going to help it cook more evenly. So we'll just do the other half now. Okay, and everybody says they cry when they chop onions. It's never affected me. My family's always like in tears and leaving the kitchen when I'm chopping onions, but I don't know, do you cry when you chop onions? Doesn't phase me a bit. Okay, so now that we've got our onions chopped, we're going to set them to the side and start making our sauce for our baked spaghetti casserole. Okay, so I'm going to get started on the sauce, and I've got a pot of water on my stove behind me already getting up to boiling so that we can start cooking the pasta while the sauce is simmering. So go ahead and get a big pot and fill it with water and get that heating so that it's ready to go. So while the sauce simmers, you can cook your pasta. It just speeds up the process a little bit. So when your pan is hot, we're going to add about one pound of ground beef. Now, you can use Italian sausage, sweet Italian sausage, or spicy Italian sausage, whatever you like. You could do half sausage, half ground beef. We usually just use ground beef, and this is a Morlene 9010 ground beef, whatever you prefer. So we're going to add our ground beef to our pan. And then I like to use this little meat chopper tool to break it up. All right, so once your meat has been cooking for just a couple of minutes to just start browning, but it's still pink, we're going to add half of that chopped onion to our meat so that it can soften and cook along with the meat to really add depth of flavor to that filling. And we're saving the rest of the onion for the cheesy sauce layer that goes with our casserole. Now, this is also a good time to add just a sprinkle of salt and a little bit of pepper. When you're cooking, it's a good idea to season as you go for each step. It builds layers of flavor so that you have a better dish in the end. And that's a secret that a lot of restaurants use is they season as they go. They don't just add all of the salt at once. So now we're just going to continue to cook the ground beef and the onion until the beef is browned all the way through and the onions have softened. So this is a dish that my mom made for my family all the time when I was growing up. I had four siblings and she made it every Halloween, but also like all year long. And I think it's because it was something that we all loved. Every single one of us, even the picky eaters ate spaghetti casserole. So it's a really kid-friendly dish and a family favorite. I kind of think of this as like a poor man's lasagna. It's a little bit easier than working with lasagna noodles. You're just using spaghetti noodles. And so it's got really similar ideas though in the layering of the cheese and the tomato, like the marinara sauce and the meat. And it's got those really great comforting classic lasagna flavors, just in a little bit more approachable, easier to make dish. Okay, so once the meat has browned nicely, whoo, steaming. We're going to add your favorite marinara sauce. You could do it from scratch, but there are some really great jarred marinara sauce that you can buy pre-made. And I'm just going to use that because this is kind of a shortcut meal for us. So we're going to add the marinara sauce. Also, if your ground beef has released a lot of like grease or fat, go ahead and drain that off first. If you're using a leaner ground beef, you don't need to do that stuff. But if you've got a lot of grease, go ahead and get rid of that. So I'm just going to add my marinara sauce and I'll link to the recipe below that has all of the measurements and ingredients for you that you can print out to follow along at home. And then add the rest of the salt. It's about a half a teaspoon of salt that we're going to use total. And I like to use two teaspoons of Italian seasoning just to boost those herbs in this. You could use fresh basil if you wanted to, but I think dried Italian seasoning works great. So let's stir that all together. And then this is going to simmer for about 15 minutes while we're working with the spaghetti pasta and getting that cooked to al dente. Okay, so now that my sauce is simmering, I'm going to take it over to the stove and let it simmer over there while we cook the pasta. All right, so now I've got a boiling pot of water. And before I add my spaghetti, I'm going to salt the water. So I'm just going to fill my hand up with a decent amount of salt. It's probably about a tablespoon of salt, maybe a little bit more, and add that to the water. The reason you want to salt your water is because pasta is going to absorb that seasoning, but only while it's cooking. You can't really season it after it's cooked, or you can, but it just doesn't have the same effect. So this will make your pasta taste even better. So once that salt is in your water, we can add our pasta. So this is spaghetti, and it's a pound of spaghetti, and I'm going to break it in half and add it. And then just stir the spaghetti down into the water. You want to stir it a couple of times so that it doesn't clump together while it's cooking. It just separates the pasta strands so they cook individually. Okay, and once those are all submerged, we're going to set a timer. Check your package directions. This spaghetti pasta takes about 11 minutes to cook to al dente, so that's what we're going to do. Set a timer for 11 minutes. Okay, so now our pasta is done. The timer just went off, so we're going to drain it. Okay, and we'll add this back to the pot. And then I'm going to add a little bit of olive oil and stir it in just so the pasta doesn't start sticking to itself before we have a chance to add the other ingredients. Normally, I wouldn't do that because the olive oil can make it so sauces don't stick to your pasta as well. But for a casserole where we're going to layer it, that's, it works great, and it keeps it from sticking too badly. All right, so now, and this part is optional, but if you really want to make this extra, like so extra, this is a really good step to add some butter and eggs and Parmesan to your pasta. So I'm going to melt a little bit of butter. I'll be right back. Okay, so I've got my melted butter, and we're going to add two eggs and whisk those together. Now, this can be left out. When my mom made this when I was growing up, we didn't do this extra step, and it definitely saves on calories to skip adding the butter. We're going to toss this with our pasta, and it's going to add like a major flavor addition to the spaghetti casserole. Okay, once that's all whisked, we're going to add about half a cup of freshly grated Parmesan cheese. Okay, and whisk that all together, and then we're going to pour this right over our hot pasta. I've heard this dish called millionaire spaghetti sometimes, just because adding the butter to it makes it really rich. I don't know. We always called it spaghetti casserole, but it's really delicious like this. So once you've got that pasta coated, you can set that to the side, and we've got one more step. So the last layer that we're getting ready to assemble is our cheese layer, and this is made, I'm just going to use the same bowl that I did my butter and egg and Parmesan in, because why dirty another bowl? But this is made with sour cream. It's about a cup and a half of sour cream, and I'm using full-fat sour cream. This is not exactly diet food, but it's delicious and totally worth it. And then cottage cheese. Now, if you don't like cottage cheese, you could replace this with cream cheese, softened cream cheese instead, or you could use ricotta cheese. My husband hates cottage cheese, but even he loves this dish. You don't really notice the cottage cheese. It's going to bake down and give it a nice cheesy flavor, and then we're going to add some black pepper, and then we've got that other half of our chopped onion that we're going to add. And I like adding the onion. It doesn't get softened as much, so you get a little bit more of an onion bite in the casserole when it bakes. So we're just going to stir that all together, and we'll have our cheese layer ready to go, and then we can start assembling our spaghetti casserole. Okay, before I start assembling this, I'm going to spray my 9x13 pan with a little cooking spray, just so it's easier to clean up. Then you're going to layer half of your pasta into the bottom of your pan, and just spread that into an even layer. I'm going to do two layers of everything. You really could put all of your pasta in at once and just do one layer of everything, which is how we ate it growing up, but doing it with two layers just gives a little bit more of a chance for all of the elements to combine with each other, so it's a little more lasagna-like. It's totally up to you. Okay, once you've got the pasta in, the spaghetti, then we're going to do half of our cottage cheese and sour cream layer, and then it's half of your sauce that has been simmering now for about 15 to 20 minutes so that the flavors really meld together. It's nice and meaty and hearty. You could always add some mushrooms or bell peppers to your sauce to add a little bit of extra veggies to this, and then we're going to sprinkle with half of our mozzarella cheese, so it's about a cup and a half of mozzarella cheese for each layer, so three cups of cheese total. Okay, and then we're going to... And then we're going to repeat. This is a really great dish to make ahead of time because you can pop it in the refrigerator or you can even freeze this. It makes a great freezer meal. Just pull it out the night before and let it thaw overnight in the fridge, and then bake it in the oven just like you normally would. It might take a little bit longer if you're baking it when it's cold versus when I put this in the oven now, it won't take quite as long since a lot of the elements are already hot, but it's really great for taking to friends who just had a baby or somebody's been sick. You can divide this and make it in two square, like eight by eight pans instead of a big nine by 13. It feeds an army, which is probably why my mom always made it to feed her big family. Okay, and we're going to finish it off with the rest of the mozzarella cheese. Okay, I'm going to cover this with foil and pop it in the oven. Okay, I actually made this spaghetti casserole for my friend who just had a baby, and I'm going to take it over for her so she can put it in the freezer and have something to feed her family whenever she needs it, but I've got another one ready to go that I'm going to pull out of the oven and dish up and taste for you. Okay, so we've got our hot baked spaghetti casserole out of the oven. It's been resting for about 15 minutes just because if you let it rest a little bit longer, it helps it not fall apart quite so much when you slice it and put it on plates. So now it's time to slice it. So I'm just going to use my spatula to cut big squares, but you could always just use a big spoon to dish this up if that's easier. So now I'm just going to try to get this out, and look at that. Not going to press my luck. Just slide it off onto a plate, and you can see it looks just like lasagna pretty much, except made with spaghetti instead of lasagna noodles, and cottage cheese is like a cheat to the ricotta. And then you can always sprinkle a little bit of freshly chopped parsley on top for a little bit of color, a little flavor. Mostly it's for color, to make it look pretty. Okay, now for the best part, I get to have a taste. All right, so I'm just going to cut off a big piece, and I've got all these layers of cheese and sauce and pasta. And hopefully it's not too hot. So good, you're going to love this. Thanks so much for watching. If you liked this video, be sure to like and subscribe to my channel, and let me know in the comments below what your favorite childhood dinner was.