Blog Trials: Baked Penne with Roasted Vegetables

After a few days of taking visiting family out to various Ann Arbor restaurants, I’m back in the kitchen trying out new recipes! I leave for a weeklong vacation in just a few days, so my boyfriend and I picked out a recipe that would generate a quantity of food ideal for feeding us well but not having waste. We made the Baked Penne with Roasted Vegetables from my all time favorite blog, Joanne Eats Well With Others (check out her site!). I was also excited because this recipe gave a wonderful excuse to break out my new ceramic baking dish from Target.

We love recipes involving zucchini and yellow squash, and were particularly excited to see a baked penne recipe incorporating our favorite veggies.

The one clarification I would make in the recipe is that it calls for 1 cup of fontina cheese – this is definitely 1 cup of grated fontina. Maybe that is obvious, but for some reason my boyfriend and I bought a 10-oz block of fontina with the intention of grating one cup (8-oz). We quickly realized we ended up with over 4 cups grated. For the “3 cups of good marinara sauce”, we used one 24-oz jar of Prego Tomato Basil Garlic.

This recipe was unanimously deemed a “winner”, with the perfect ratio of well-seasoned vegetables to penne and cheese. We will definitely be making this again as a school-year favorite, as it was very easy to make and generated 6 very large and filling servings (enough for a week!).