Pancetta Spinach and Penne Casserole

It’s dark, rainy, and cold. I feel like I have stumbled into something Edgar Allan Poe wrote. Something awful is about to happen. Good thing there’s something called comfort food for days (or weeks) like this. My favorite part besides the taste? It’s another Cooking Light recipe!

For lack of a better name, they call it Penne with Pancetta,Spinach, and Buttery Crumb Topping. It’s a creamy, gooey, cheesy, yummy, salty, carb fest with some spinach that you can sneak in to get kids to eat something green without complaints. And since my legal adult sister can still be a picky eater unless her boyfriend makes it, I made this with her in mind while our parents were on vacation.

Some differences:

I thought we had a box of penne at home when I went grocery shopping. I was wrong. We had cavatappi instead! I thought, “hey! That would be fun!” but then when I started to get things ready to make it, I realized that the store brand box of pasta only has 12oz in it. The recipe calls for a pound. I was down 4oz. Ended up back at the store anyway to buy more cavatappi and to buy a fresh baguette.

We have made this a number of times because everyone loves it but we all want more pancetta. I doubled the amount of pancetta the recipe calls for. Can’t find pancetta? Feel free to use ham! We made this dish after Easter once and used the leftover spiral ham to add some extra meat.

Some tips:

Do as much of the prep work you can ahead of time. This recipe makes a lot of dishes and has a number of steps.

You can buy pre-chopped ingredients but doing it yourself is better for your budget and for your palate. Pre-chopped ingredients do not last very long in your refrigerator because you can’t be entirely sure how long they’ve been sitting in the fridge at the store.

I’m only working part time and I’ll be starting grad school in a few months so I have a lot of time at the house these days to do more cooking. This means that I had time during the day to chop my spinach, onions, and garlic, to grate the cheese, and to make the fresh breadcrumbs. Doing all of that before dinner time meant that I cut down on some of the dishes. There are sooooo many dirty dishes when this recipe is done.

Last tip – time your pan cooking around your pasta. I didn’t start my onions, pancetta, and garlic sauté until the pasta had about 5 minutes left on the timer. One timer means less stress in my book!

The only problem with this recipe? It’s addictive! You’ll want seconds or thirds and it will be so hard to resist.

Make it on a day as dreary as this one and you’ll be sure to banish that Raven tapping at your chamber door.

The last delicious bite.