This showstopper cheesy baked pasta with chicken sausages and all the goodness of veggies baked to perfection with lots of cheese is a crowd-pleasing cross between pizzas and pastas!
As you must be getting ready for the year-end parties and fun, I thought of sharing this wonderful recipe of cheesy baked pasta which can be perfect to serve a crowd.
This cheesy baked pasta can also be called a pizza pasta bake the reason of which I will reveal shortly and is a fun recipe without any hard work. This has lots of goodness of veggies hidden under the cheesiness which everyone loves.
So even if you have a fussy veggie-hating kid, you won’t have much problem with him/her falling for this cheesy pasta. I adapted this recipe of cheesy baked pasta or pizza pasta bake from one of my favorite YouTubers Beth from Entertaining with Beth.
I feel she has endless awesome recipes and I keep trying my hands on them. This baked pasta with a twist turned out to be an instant hit; it not only looks good but also makes you craving for more.
I simply fell in love with this colorful and loaded cheesy baked pasta as it has everything I like. It has chicken sausages, celery, carrots, onions and all these came together to create a match made in heaven.
With the gooey melting cheese on top, you will never feel less mesmerized! This cheesy baked pasta is a sure-shot crowd pleasure; try it in one of your family dinners during the holidays and you will thank me for this!
You may be wondering why it is called pizza pasta bake! That’s simply because it has all the elements of pizza toppings which are loaded into a pasta dish instead of a pizza bread! That’s what I call innovation!
You have sausages, onions, tomato sauce, mozzarella cheese and Italian seasoning in this cheesy baked pasta and essentially these are the key pizza ingredients; hence the name pizza pasta bake! How cool is that?
Before going into further details of this recipe, let’s do some meaningless chit chat. What do you say? Two more work weeks left in this year before the fun begins.
Both the upcoming weeks are shorter than usual with Christmas and New Year falling on Fridays! How cool is that! Two consecutive long weekends imply nothing else other than double the fun and enjoyment! I love the merry mood around this time of the year all over the globe and I feel it’s kind of infectious.
No matter how good or bad your current year was, we always feel joyful about the coming one, which I believe is the best way to live life – learn from the mistakes of past and take on the challenges of future! You go girl!
Well, this chit chat is not all that meaningless, isn’t it? I actually uttered something very important – learning from your own mistakes! Like I learn every time from my disastrous food experiments!
And then I move on; to take on new challenges and create new disasters! This way I set up new benchmark of mistakes with every new disaster I create! I am serious! I am very serious about my learnings!
Thankfully I didn’t make any mistake while making this cheesy baked pasta and I am sure if you follow this recipe, you will be pleased with yourself for being able to create such scrumptious cheesy baked pasta so easily and surprise as well as delight everyone with your culinary skill!
Make this cheesy baked pasta this holiday season adding your own innovation and enjoy the festivities to the fullest!
- Pasta – 250 gms (I used Rigatoni. Any short pasta will work here.)
- Ready cooked chicken Sausage – 250 gms, chopped
- Olive oil – 4 tbsp
- Italian seasoning – 1 tbsp
- Onion – 2, large, finely chopped
- Carrot – 1, medium, diced
- Celery stalk – 4, diced (My home-grown celery stalks are quite thin which is why I used 4, use 2 if the stalk is thick)
- Marinara Sauce – 1 cup (Use my homemade marinara sauce recipe)
- Garlic – 2 to 4 cloves, minced
- Salt and pepper to taste
- Mozzarella cheese – 200 gms, grated
- Freshly chopped parsley – 1 tbsp
- Cook pasta according to package directions. Reserve a cup of pasta water and drain the pasta. Rinse with cold water and set aside.
- In a large pot heat the olive oil. Sautee minced garlic, onion, carrot and celery until tender which will take about 5 to 8 minutes. Then add marinara sauce and Italian seasoning. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Cook for five minutes on medium flame until tomato puree is somewhat reduced.
- Now add the drained pasta to the sauce pot. Toss to coat and transfer the pasta mixture into a large oven safe casserole dish.
- Cover the pasta with grated mozzarella cheese and place casserole under the broiler for 2-4 mins until cheese is golden brown and bubbly. Make sure to keep an eye while your pasta is under the broiler as few seconds delay can turn your pasta from showstopper to disaster!
- Sprinkle freshly chopped parsley and serve this delicious cheesy baked pasta directly on the table for the whole family! Enjoy!
Hi. This is really good. But why is it named as pizza pasta bake?
Hey! This has all the elements of pizzas like veggeies, chicken and cheese but instead of bread you have pasta. 🙂