Summer sanity and my Baked Spaghetti Recipe

While most people were out celebrating summer, I was having a mini-meltdown. We’d had a wonderful spring break and then… something about the coming summer just filled me with dread. After having a box of wine and discussing it with my husband, I narrowed the reason down to the fact that the first few months of every spring and summer year are Very Hard for me. That’s because my husband’s a business administrator for a major retreat center and it doesn’t take long for those long Busy Season hours to kick in. Starting early spring I’m virtually a single mom, responsible for getting kids ready and to school /summer programs, every day, doing my own work, picking them up from school, cooking dinner, supervising homework, music lessons, church, choir etc., and then getting them to bed. My husband leaves before dawn and comes home usually about midnight- mostly to add a daily collection of sweaty shirts to the laundry, so the majority of parenting responsibilities fall to me.

During those weeks Cooper’s Café is inactive. I mean we do eat but I found out that a delightful varied menu with 5 choices is wasted on 2 picky eaters who don’t ever CARE if the meatloaf is from scratch. So in order to keep myself sane I have found a few easy stand-bys that they will eat and I won’t cry into the bowl of homemade garlic mashed potatoes. Here’s one that makes great leftovers!

Baked Spaghetti Recipe

Ingredients:

·         1 lb.  ground turkey

·         16 oz. whole wheat spaghetti

·         2 26 oz. jars spaghetti sauce

·         1 cup pureed butternut squash (optional)

·         2 cups shredded mozzarella cheese

Preparation:

1.    Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Lightly grease a 9 x 13 pan.

2.    Brown ground turkey in a large skillet over medium heat. Drain.

3.    Prepare pasta according to package directions. Drain.

4.    Stir spaghetti sauce and butternut squash into the ground turkey.

5.    Spoon one-third of the spaghetti sauce mixture into the bottom of the prepared pan.

6.    Mix the remaining spaghetti sauce mixture with the cooked spaghetti. Pour into the prepared pan.

7.    Top with the shredded cheese. Bake 20-30 minutes until browned and bubbly. Let baked spaghetti sit 10 minutes before serving.