Scenes from an Italian Restaurant

I'll give you a dollar if you can tell me where I got the title of this post. :)

Tonight we made Baked Ziti with breadsticks and Caesar salad. I am a bit of a Baked Ziti connoisseur, so I wanted to see if we could make a dish that rivaled what you can order at a restaurant. Good news -- we succeeded. This recipe is from Cooks.com.

Baked Ziti with Italian Sausage
1/2 lb. sweet Italian sausage
1/2 c. mushrooms
1/3 c. onions
1 c. peppers
8 oz. ziti
3 1/2 c. spaghetti sauce (can be jar)
1 c. mozzarella cheese
1/4 c. Parmesan cheese
1 clove garlic

Slice sausage - brown meat in skillet. Add garlic, mushrooms, peppers and onions; saute vegetables until soft. Drain excess fat off. Cook ziti according to package; drain. Combine ziti with 2 cups of sauce. Spread 1/4 cup sauce on bottom of pan. Arrange 1/2 the ziti in pan. Spoon sausage vegetable mixture evenly over ziti. Top with 1/2 cup sauce, 2/3 cup mozzarella cheese and 2 tablespoons Parmesan cheese. Cover with remaining ziti sauce and cheese. Bake at 350 degrees for 25 minutes.

We used regular Italian sausage (not sweet), and we used an ounce or two more than the recipe calls for. We used the kind that is ground up like hamburger. We used sweet red peppers. We also cut out the mushrooms, because Bryan and I are both fungus-haters, and we didn't want to ruin our ziti.

For the spaghetti sauce, we mixed a 29-oz. can of tomato sauce with 1 envelope of McCormick brand spaghetti sauce mix. If you've ever had Mom's spaghetti, this is the stuff she uses. The recipe calls for 3 1/2 cups of sauce, which is 28 oz., so this worked perfectly. I'm sure you could use pre-made spaghetti sauce from a jar and it would be fine, I just don't really like the pre-made stuff.

The pasta will get a little softer as you bake it, so make sure you drain the water while it's still pretty firm. I think the official term is al dente.

I didn't measure the cheese, just eye-balled it. I'm sure I used more than the recipe calls for, but tell me, how can you go wrong with more cheese? You can't. I just made sure each layer was covered with mozzarella, and then added parmesan sparingly so it didn't overpower.

We just used the breadsticks you buy in the tube that pops open. If you want to jazz them up a bit, sprinkle some parmesan cheese on them before you bake them, and voila! Parmesan breadsticks. You have to sort of push the parmesan onto the dough to make it stick, and you'll have a bit of extra cheese on the cookie sheet, but that's ok. It just gives the breadstick some extra oommph. Very tasty.

The Caesar salad was the Dole brand kit from the store. We always end up throwing out about half of the salad, because it's too much for two people, and Caesar salad doesn't really keep. I was lamenting to Bryan that no one sells things in "couple servings" or something like that, because every recipe we make is way too much food for two people. But I digress.

Bryan gave the ziti his seal of approval, and that's high praise indeed. Try it. You'll love it.