Baked Ziti with Chickpea Pasta (And NO Meat!)
So for Easter, my stepmom made her FAMOUS lasagna that takes like literally 8 hours to make. It’s so freaking good but I no longer eat meat (btw posting my “why I’m a pescatarian” blog post next week if you have questions about that) so I had to come up with an alternative option. I didn’t feel like going all the way to the store either, so I tried to use as many of the Lasagna ingredients as possible with a few modifications.
I’ve never made baked Ziti before but I’ve had it at restaurants so figured I’d just give it the old college try. How can you really go wrong with pasta, red sauce and cheese?!
The pasta I typically use for any sort of Italian dish is Banza, which is made from chickpeas and packed with protein. You can obviously substitute for any other pasta of your choice but this one is my far my favorite. Banza has 4 servings per box, and each serving has 14g of protein. I use the whole box for this recipe, so just in the pasta alone there's 56g protein (not bad for having no meat!).
I’ve included the full ingredients list and directions below. I always eye ball my recipes so I’ve tried to provide as many measurements as I can,
INGREDIENTS:
1 Box Banza Pasta
1 1/2 to 2 Cups Rao’s Marinara Sauce
2 Tbsp Extra Virgin Olive Oil
1/4 Onion (chopped)
1/2 Red Pepper (chopped)
Parmesan
Mozzarella
Fresh Basil
Red Pepper Flakes (Optional)
Salt & Pepper
DIRECTIONS:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Cook 1 full box of Banza Pasta on the stove (al dente since it will cook in the oven!), usually takes about 8 minutes. PRO TIP: Banza pasta usually makes the boiling water foam so lay a wooden spoon across the top of the pot and it should prevent it from overflowing.
Chop up fresh peppers and onions. Feel free to add any other veggies too - like spinach or tomatoes!
Sautee the chopped vegetables on the stove with olive oil. This should take about 5-7 minutes or so.
Drain pasta and then place into baking pan. Pour in the chopped veggie mixture (with excess olive oil from pan) straight from the stove. Mix in red pepper flakes and S&P.
Add in Rao’s marinara sauce, use a generous amount of it. Mix so all the pasta is covered in sauce.
Mix in parmesan cheese.
Pat down the pasta with a spatula or spoon so that it is dense in the pan.
Top with a few more spoon fulls of red sauce, Parmesan and Mozzarella cheese
Add basil on top. PRO TIP: I use kitchen scissors to cut my basil evenly!
Bake at 350 for 30 minutes - if you want the cheese to have that golden brown on the top, put on a broil for 2-3 minutes or so.
Voila! Let cool for a few minutes and devour.
Enjoy!
