A little bit of baking - Rigatoni Pie

I've seen this particular dish all over Facebook and Pinterest for a while, and I thought I would try my hand at it to see if I could do it with any success. And I am proud to say it wasn't too hard and I was able to make it pretty well. I am calling it Rigatoni Pie and it was a big success here at our house. I am here to tell you that you can make it too.  I am all about giving credit where credit it due and I am fairly certain that this was originally found at TheNoblePig.com so check it out there if you can.

Here are the ingredients that I needed:

• 1 pound of rigatoni
• container of shaved parmesan/arregiano
• 1 pound of hamburger meat
• tomato sauce of your choice
• mozzarella cheese - either shredded or finely  cut however you would like
• springform pan
• cookie sheet
• aluminum foil

Preheat oven to 350 to prepare the oven and boil the pound of rigatoni. While the rigatoni is boiling brown the hamburger meat. I have learned that while the rigatoni is boiling in the  water to keep a wooden spoon over the pot to keep the water from boiling over.

Once the rigatoni is cooked and I have strained it I make sure to wash it with cold water so that I can handle it better. I then put it in a large mixing bowl and sprinkle it with the parmesan/arregiano cheese so that it will be easier to handle when I go to stack it in the springform pan.

I then move on to the browning hamburger meat. I drain the fat and I add the tomato sauce. If you like other vegetables with it you may add it at that time. and let it simmer.

I then move on to the springform pan.  I make sure that aluminum foil has lined the cookie sheet as well as the spring form pan so that the tomato sauce I eventually put in does not leak through. I make sure that the springform pan is at an angle so that it's easier to do what I need to do and I start stacking the rigatoni in the pan. This will take some time but every piece of the rigatoni - the whole pound - will fit in that pan.

             

Once you are done, you then move on to the tomatoe sauce with meat.  You then spread that on top of the rigatoni and let it fall within the wholes of the rigatoni. To give it some help I used some old chopsticks I had and pushed in the wholes to help.

    

Once I was done there I took some shredded mozzarella and spread it on top. Then I put some aluminum on top and put it in the oven and cooked it for 30 minutes. For the last 5 minutes I took the aluminum foil off so that it would brown a bit. Then I took it off and let it sit for 5 or 10 minutes to just set up.

Once that 10 minutes was up I took the aluminum foil off and took the sides of the springform pan off and I had a beautiful rigatoni pie. I cut it just like a rigatoni pie and serviced with some french bread to the family.  The general consensus was that it was delicious.  A welcome deviation from our usual spaghetti and lasagna.  I hope you enjoy it too.