Baked Macaroni Pasta and Garlic Bread

Today's kitchen adventure involves pasta. Finally! A pasta post! For all our readers out there, another thing you should know about us is that we love pasta...and you will frequently see us post about it in the future. Pasta, is easy and practically foolproof. All you have to do is boil water, put pasta in and wait. If you can't manage that then you probably shouldn't be in the kitchen to begin with! (kidding! hehe). But this is precisely why we love making pasta, it's simple, easy and hard to screw up... You should also know that we love pasta because if there's anything we may possibly love more than chocolate... it's cheese. Today's recipe brought us to make some baked macaroni pasta and home made garlic bread.

Baked Macaroni Ingredients: Serves 4-5 people

2.5-3 cups elbow macaroni
1 jar tomato pasta sauce sauce
Cheese
1 package ground beef (we used around 0.4 kg [we like our meat] which is just under a pound)
2 tsp Olive oil
Salt and pepper
Herbs of choice

1. Start by cooking your pasta. Boil some water and throw in some salt and olive oil (the oil helps prevent the macaroni from sticking to each other once cooked)
2. In a sauteeing/frying pan add some olive oil and begin to cook your ground beef.  Season as it cooks with salt and pepper and herbs of your choice. Add some butter if you want an extra richness and creamy taste to it.
3. Once your ground beef has cooked add in your jar of tomato pasta sauce. We used a tomato, garlic and basil flavor. Any brand will do, we're cheap so we just bought whatever was the cheapest. We bought a 700ml jar and ended up using most of it. Be generous with the sauce, because when the macaroni bakes some of it will evaporate and if you don't use enough the pasta may come out a little dry.
4. After adding the pasta sauce to the ground beef, mix in your cheese. You can use any cheese you want, but we ended up using smoked gouda. The smoked gouda gave it a nice roasted flavor as opposed to a more pungent flavor from typical pasta cheeses such as parmiggiano reggiano. Add in as much or as little cheese as you want (we recommend adding quite a bit for a nice rich and creamy taste). We put around 2-3 cups in the sauce mixture.
5. Drain your macaroni and toss it into the sauce, and mix everything making sure the sauce and macaroni are well incorporated.
6. Transfer the pasta into an oven safe dish and top with more cheese and bake at 375F for about 30-35 minutes.

Baked Macaroni Pasta

Garlic Bread Ingredients:

1 baguette
Garlic
Butter

1. Slice your baguette into the thickness you desire for your garlic bread.
2. Spread butter on each piece
3. Take a garlic clove and rub it onto each piece of buttered baguette (if you want a really strong garlic flavor you can finely chop up some garlic and top off your buttered garlic baguette with it)
4. Bake at 375F with the macaroni for a few minutes till the bread is nice and crispy (monitor the bread because it can burn easily in the oven!)

Garlic Bread

Here's how our final meal turned out:

Baked Macaroni Pasta with Homemade Garlic Bread

This easy fool proof pasta recipe gets the hammer and potato seal of approval!