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Baked Rigatoni and Meatballs
Baked Rigatoni and Meatballs

Before you jump to Baked Rigatoni and Meatballs recipe, you may want to read this short interesting healthy tips about Finding Healthful Fast Food.

Just about every single article you read about restoring your health or weight loss is going to tell you to ignore the drive through and cook all of your meals instead. This is actually very true. Once in a while, though, you definitely do not wish to make a full meal for your family or even just for yourself. Once in a while you only want to check out the drive through while you are on your way home and complete the day. There is zero reason you shouldn’t be able to do this once in a while and be free of the guilt usually associated with “diet slips”. This is possible because plenty of the popular fast food destinations making the effort to make their menus healthy now. Here is how one can find healthy food choices at the drive through.

Milk, juice and water would be the best selections for beverages. Drinking a large soft drink allows hundreds of empty unhealthy calories into your diet. Usually an individual portion of soft drinks is only eight ounces big. That helping usually is made up of a minimum of a hundred calories and more than a few tablespoons of sugar. Most fast food soft drink sizes start out at twenty ounces. Usually, however, they may be 30 ounces. Choosing a soda as your drink boosts your calorie absorption by thousands and adds way too much sugar to your diet. Milk, fruit juices or plain water are more healthy options.

Traditional logic tells us that one positive way to get healthy and lose weight is to by pass the drive through and to remove fast food restaurants from your thoughts. While, for the most part, this is a good strategy, if you make intelligent choices, there is no reason to feel guilty for visiting a drive through one or two times a month. Sometimes the best thing is to let someone else produce your dinner. There isn’t any reason to feel terrible about going to the drive through when you make healthy and balanced decisions!

We hope you got insight from reading it, now let’s go back to baked rigatoni and meatballs recipe. You can cook baked rigatoni and meatballs using 19 ingredients and 5 steps. Here is how you cook it.

The ingredients needed to cook Baked Rigatoni and Meatballs:
  1. Prepare rigatoni noodles
  2. Provide ricotta cheese
  3. Use shredded mozzarella cheese
  4. Take Sauce:
  5. Use olive oil
  6. Take garlic, minced
  7. Take each unsalted tomato sauce
  8. You need heavy cream
  9. Use each dried basil, dried parsley
  10. Prepare each salt, granulated sugar, onion powder
  11. You need pepper
  12. Provide Meatballs:
  13. Take ground beef
  14. Provide breadcrumbs
  15. You need freshly grated parmesan cheese
  16. You need large egg
  17. Use dried parsley
  18. Provide each salt, pepper, onion powder, garlic powder, basil
  19. Provide olive oil
Steps to make Baked Rigatoni and Meatballs:
  1. First thing to do is get your sauce going. In a large pot, heat the oil over medium heat. Once it's hot, add the garlic. Cook and stir just until it's fragrant… only a minute or two. Then pour in the tomato sauce, cream, sugar and seasonings. Once it starts to simmer, reduce the heat down to low and start preparing the meatballs.
  2. For the meatballs, place the ground beef, breadcrumbs, cheese, egg and seasonings into a large bowl. Use your hands to mix and incorporate everything together. Then roll the meat mixture into mini meatballs. Heat the oil over medium heat in a large skillet. Once it's hot, add the meatballs to the skillet in batches. Cook and roll them around in the skillet every few minutes until they are browned on all sides. Then remove them from the skillet and stir them gently into the sauce.
  3. Preheat the oven to 350°F. Grease a 9x13" baking pan and set it aside. Heat a large pot of salted water over high heat. Once it begins to boil, stir in the rigatoni pasta and cook according to package directions, until al dente. Drain and return to the pot. Then stir the ricotta cheese into the hot pasta. Add the sauce and meatballs to the pot and stir it all together. Then turn it out into the greased pan and sprinkle the mozzarella cheese evenly over the top.
  4. Bake uncovered for 20 minutes, or until heated through and the cheese has a nice golden color. Serve immediately.
  5. If you only wanted to bake a smaller serving at a time, you could turn out the pasta mixture into two greased 8x8"baking pans instead of the larger 9x13". Top one with cheese and cook it immediately. Let the second one cool down completely, then top with the cheese, wrap it up tightly and place it in the freezer. The night before you're planning on baking it, place it in the fridge to thaw out overnight, then bake it for 30-40 minutes or until 165°F throughout. Each 8x8" pan will serve 4 people.

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