Pizza Pasta Bake

My youngest sister, R, moved in this weekend. The first few days haven't been too bad, though it will be an adjustment. I have lived on my own for about 4 or 5 years now, and have gotten used to doing whatever I want (like playing the radio when I get ready for work at the ridiculous hour of 6 am).

On Saturday I had made us pizza. I used C's pizza dough, using half whole wheat flour and half all purpose flour. I topped the pizza with store bought sauce, pepperoni, red bell pepper (I wanted green but the green bell peppers were pretty icky at the store) , onion, mushrooms, and some mozzarella cheese.

The pizza was great, but the problem is I am left with half an onion, half a red bell pepper, pepperoni, mushrooms, sauce and cheese. I don't want to waste the leftovers, but I also don't want to have pizza two nights in a row.

So I made a pizza pasta bake. Which also gave me a chance to use my 3.5 quart KitchenAid dutch oven.

I made nearly the entire bake in the dutch oven, which included stirring the pasta and sauce together, which is why the sides are so messy. Sorry.

The pasta bake came from my head, so the recipe is mine. This was made to use up leftovers, so the amounts are "half of this" or "roughly this". The pasta bake will serve four or five.

Rebekah's Pizza Pasta Bake

1) Set a pot of water to boil and cook a box of whole wheat penne according to instructions. (It's ok to under cook a bit, as it will finish cooking in the oven)

2) Meanwhile, in a dutch oven, heat a small amount of extra virgin olive oil. Add half of a minced onion. Saute for a couple minutes, add roughly four or five sliced mushrooms.

3) For this step I used pizza pepperoni (which I can only find at Safeway sadly). I took about 10 slices and cut them into four like so:

Yes. I did this in Paint. Why? Because my skills in Paint are awesome.

Add the cut pepperoni slices to the mushrooms and onions, after the mushrooms have cooked down (about two minutes), heat the pepperoni slices for a minute.

4) If you had made pizza the night before this is when you could add the leftover pizza sauce. Mine equaled out to about a cup of sauce. You could also add a jar of any kind of red pasta sauce.

5) Add half of a red pepper, minced. (or chopped if you don't mind large pieces of soft red pepper)

6) Add the cooked pasta. Stir together, and add about a tbsp of grated mozza cheese. I did this to sort of bind the pasta and sauce. Top with more cheese. I had used a little over half a cup of cheese in total.

7) Bake at 350 F for about 30 minutes until the cheese is melted, and golden.

This was a great way to use up the leftovers, and it doesn't taste like pizza leftovers.