 Hey everybody, today we're making ziti pasta, a nice casserole for you. It's sort of like lasagna if you haven't had it before. Nice and cheesy and creamy and just delicious. I'm also going to be doing a healthy twist with it, of course. I'm gonna be using some really quality ingredients, which we're gonna go over in a little bit. So I'm Rockin' Robin and I'm gonna show you how to do it right after this. We're gonna start off with our chef joke and don't forget there'll be another one a little bit later in the video, so stay tuned. What do you call something that tastes like pasta, looks like pasta, but it is in pasta? And in pasta, like I said, we are making this as healthy as we can and I love to read labels. So if you're like me, you're gonna love this recipe because I've read all the labels and I know that there's only good quality ingredients in this recipe. So first up, I'm using Bonsa Pasta. Now this is supposed to be a zita pasta recipe, right? But Bonsa doesn't make zita type noodles that I've seen. So I'm using the shells here and you can use any pasta you want really. I chose the shells because they kind of hold the sauce really nicely in it. Now you can see in the ingredients on this, you can compare the Bonsa Pasta with average regular pasta and you can see how much protein there is in each one, the fiber and the net carbs. Now I'm using ground beef. You could use sausage or a combination thereof. If you want to, I'm using some ground beef here but it is 100% grass-fed and finished. Next up is my sauce. I'm using a spaghetti sauce that I think is really clean, really good quality and you can get it at Costco. So check this out. This is Rayo sauce that Costco has the best deal ever and that's where I buy it. So check out these ingredients. You can read every single one of them. We've got Italian whole peeled tomatoes, olive oil, onion, salt, garlic, basil, black pepper and oregano. Love it. We'll also be using one finely diced yellow onion. I have some super fine diced here on some commini mushrooms that I really diced up small. If you want to leave them larger, you can. I've got some rosemary fresh out of my garden. Now for my herbs, I'm using fresh basil and fresh parsley and I tell you, it really makes a difference. I put this in my sauce and it just really makes that sauce so much better so don't miss that step. We'll need some salt. I'm going to use garlic powder today. We'll need some olive oil and for our cheeses, I'm using some grated mozzarella. I'm using some sour cream which by the way, if you read the ingredient list here, I'll show it to you and you can see what's in there. It's just nice and clean. And I'm also using some cottage cheese. Again, the ingredients are very clean. And the last thing is some Parmesan cheese that's been grated. Here's our setup. I've got a pot of water back here that I'm starting to boil so that that's for my pasta and it will be ready when I need to cook it. Over here, this is going to be my pan for my sauce and we can go ahead and just pour that in now. Now, if you happen to have a bottle of red wine sitting around that's opened and you want to use it for some cooking, you can pour a little bit, this is optional, but you can pour a little bit in your jar to kind of get all the rest of the reo sauce in the pan and you add a little extra flavor. In our frying pan over here, I'm going to saute the onions and the mushrooms. And we'll do that for, I'm going to do it for 10 minutes. So you want to get some olive oil in there, toss in your onions. Here goes our mushrooms. Got my temperature on medium high and once this gets hot, then we'll lower it and just, like I said, just saute it until it gets nice and soft and a good 10 minutes should do it. Once the onions get going, I'm going to put in a little bit of salt and you're going to want to stir these periodically. All right, next up we're going to take our rosemary and I'm going to peel off the little petals. And you can always use a little bit more of the fresh rosemary than you would if you were using dried. Okay, and then we'll just, I want to chop this up nice and fine. So you want to measure about a teaspoon of the rosemary. Okay, if it's a little over, that's not a problem. And I'm going to place that in my sauce. Now I'm turning the temperature on this to low to start getting it hot. Next is our basil. I'm just going to take the leaves, pile them up. That's what you do. Get rid of that stem there. So you stack up a few like this. You want to roll them, give them a nice little roll. And then you're just going to slice just like this. And you get these nice little ribbons that go in really nice into your sauce. I like to cut them just the other way, just one time or two, just so they're not real long. I'm going to continue cutting up the basil until I get it all in the sauce. We're going to do the same kind of thing with our fresh parsley. So I'm just going to take some and just kind of shave it off so I don't get too many stems. All right, have a look at our onions. It's been about 10 minutes. They are nice and soft and they are ready to go into the sauce. And we'll give that a nice stir. Look at this sauce, nice and rich. Look at that. In the same pan that we cooked the onions, I'm going to place the ground beef in the pan now. I'll add some salt to the ground beef and some garlic powder. Cook this until it's no longer pink. The ground beef is done. You can see there's a fair amount of grease in there. So we're going to strain it and place it into our sauce. Stir that in. All right, once I get that mixed in there, we're going to turn, keep the temperature. It's on low and we're going to simmer this for at least 10 minutes. Longer is always better so the flavors can mingle. And I'm going to cover it so that it doesn't reduce. It's time to cook the pasta. We have our water boiling here and we're going to put a little salt, and toss in a little salt into our water. The pasta says it cooks for nine to 11 minutes. We want to under-cook it by a minute or so just because it's going to go, the whole dish is going to go back in the oven for another half hour. So you just want to under-cook it just a bit. While the noodles are cooking, we are going to take our bowl here and we are going to add all of our cheeses together. So I have the cottage cheese here. I'm going to place it in a bowl. I'm going to combine everything. Cottage cheese, sour cream. I'm going to toss in the Parmesan cheese and the mozzarella. And I'm also going to add a little bit of parsley to this. I'm going to shave off some and just chop up a little bit and toss it in. Sprinkle that in and give it a stir. It's time to drain the pasta. All right, here's Chef Joke number two. Did you hear about the pasta and its cooking water? The relationship was strained. All right, I'm going to take the pasta and I'm actually going to just pour it right into my sauce. I like to have my noodles totally coated in sauce. Give that a great stir. So I have a large baking dish here. This is something like 10 by 16 approximately. So I'm going to layer half of the pasta sauce in the dish first. Now we're going to place all of our cheese sauce in the middle. Now spread this out the best you can using a spatula and a knife. Now we'll top this off with the rest of the pasta sauce. So we'll finish this off with some more grated mozzarella cheese and then some grated Parmesan cheese. In the oven we go. This goes in the oven at 375 degrees Fahrenheit for about 25 minutes. Take a look at this casserole after about 25 minutes. You want that cheese to be really melted and everything's piping hot. Here's our ziv pasta right out of the oven. It is beautiful. Smells wonderful. Let me scoop some of this up. You don't even really have to cut it because the noodles are little. So look at this. Oh my goodness. Dig in. Mamma mia, that is delicious. You gotta try it. I have a wonderful recipe for you to compliment this pasta dish that you're gonna love. Guess what it is? My ultimate garlic bread. I'm gonna leave a link for you right over here. You must try that. It's made with roasted garlic. Thanks so much for watching today. Don't forget to subscribe to my channel, smash that like button for me and leave me a comment. All right, we'll see you next time.