Creamy Beef Noodle Bake

I love trying delicious new recipes. I especially love trying new recipes that are as easy as they are delicious. That's why this Creamy Beef Noodle Bake recipe is sure to please! What's not to love about tender noodles, creamy beef and melty cheese?

This particular noodle and ground beef recipe calls for the use of egg noodles, but these can be substituted for just about any kind of standard pasta. Pick your favorite! Just keep in mind, they're going to be heaped with lots of topping, so any variety of short noodle would work best. There isn't a huge difference between egg noodles and other types of pasta (especially where calories, carbohydrates and proteins are concerned), but many traditional pastas are made with oil and/or water to add moisture rather than egg. Whatever type of noodle you choose, it is important to remember to slightly under-boil since this recipe calls for 20 minutes bake-time, which will cook your noodles further.

The other ingredients are relatively simple and are probably items most of us have on-hand in our pantries. Things like tomato sauce, onion powder (which can be substituted for real onions, which you would typically cook along with the ground beef to ensure a soft texture as well as a richer flavor), sour cream and grated cheese.

Perhaps one of the less traditional items in this recipe is the cottage cheese, which doesn't need to be substituted and can simply be left out. Cottage cheese is a fresh cheese curd with mild flavor. Rather than being pressed, it is drained so some of the whey (milk serum) remains, causing the curds to remain loose. If you haven't found your love of cottage cheese, you can try eating it a variety of ways, including with fruit and sugar or with salt and pepper, or even as a replacement for mayonnaise.

Beef steaks are often grilled, broiled or sometimes fried. Grilled beef steaks can be cooked at different temperatures, or for different lengths of time, which results in cooked steak from blue (very rare) to overdone (well done). The most common characteristics of a rare steak is a soft, cold, red center. The outside is seared for flavor, while the inside is cooked to suit the person's preference. Steaks cooked well done are most often cooked throughout the entire cut of meat. An example is a beefsteak that is cooked well done, will not have any pinkness in the middle when sliced.

Pasta is a staple food of traditional Italian cuisine, with the first origins dating back to 1154 in Sicily. It is also commonly used to refer to a wide variety of pasta dishes. Most dried pasta varieties are commercially produced via an extrusion process. Fresh pasta was traditionally produced by hand, sometimes with the aid of simple machines, but today many varieties of fresh pasta are also commercially produced by large scale machines, and the pasta varieties are available in supermarkets.