CHICKEN ALFREDO PASTA BAKE

I don’t know about you, but I love a good Alfredo. It’s rich, it’s oh so yummy. And why shouldn’t we love it? It has all the goodness of butter, cream and Parmesan. Creamy. Cheesy. Yummy. So today we’re taking good old Alfredo sauce and making a chicken pasta bake. And we’ll add more cheese plus other stuff to make a great summer pasta casserole.

So if you’re wanting cheese, this is your dish! This makes a huge serving to go around and it heats up well. It’ll make that wet squishy sound when you mix it all up, a sign of tons of creamy cheesy power. It’ll give you long strands of cheese when you dish a serving. The kind that you’ll want to run your finger along to break. And it’ll more than satisfy your cheese craving.

The great thing about this is how you can customize it to save you time. The best Alfredo sauce from scratch but you can use store-bought sauce. If you don’t like poached chicken, grill it. Or buy some rotisserie chicken and chop it up. And you can practically use any kind of pasta you want. Generally, penne is deal for bakes but there’s ziti and rigatoni.

Make sure to cook the pasta until the point just before it turns al dente. Then rinse it under cold water to stop the cooking process. Because if it continues cooking in the cheese sauce in the oven, it’ll get slightly mushy and mushy pasta is no fun…. to avoid this, finish off the al dente process in the oven. However, if you don’t mind or even like mushy pasta, then keep on cooking that pasta until it’s al dente, your choice…

There’s a lot of ricotta to go around, as you can see. So if you’re not big on it, you can halve the ricotta and egg portion before mixing it in with everything. Some people like it, some people don’t, again, your choice…

So really, if you’re looking for a fairly quick, but delicious meal idea for lunch or dinner, this one’s for you, as the amount of time it takes from start to eat is just under and hour…. not bad at all… Or if you’re a family of four and you want something for two days, here you go. And if you have a huge family, have at it. This can serve up to ten servings. The cheese is not stingy!