Pioneer Woman's Sour Cream Noodle Bake

I know I have mentioned this before, but I do not believe that Rachel Ray's 30 minute recipes only take 30 minutes to make. Even with everything out on the counter, ready to go, yup, over 30 minutes. I am a pretty darn quick chopper of veggies and the like, but still, over 30 minutes. I look at a recipe and think, oh that will be a quick meal to prepare, nope, not the case. I hope you are better than I at preparing meals because this one looked quick. (I suppose in my defense, though I multitask and say chop veggies while pasta is boiling, being quite OCD, I clean up every little mess that I make and wash my dishes as I go. So that probably adds to my prep time, but really cuts down on the post dinner clean up.) This is a really simple recipe I found on the Pioneer Woman's website, with as usual, a couple of my alterations as seen in italics.

Sour Cream Noodle Bake

Ingredients
1¼ lb ground chuck (and I did use ground chuck)
1 - 15oz can tomato sauce
½ t salt
Freshly ground black pepper
8oz egg noodles (I used the whole bag, I think it was 12 oz)
½ c sour cream (um, the recipe name has sour cream in it and the recipe only calls for 1/2 cup? I just put the full carton - I think that is 2 cups worth.)
1¼ c small curd cottage cheese (like the sour cream, I just added the whole carton)
½ c sliced green onions
1 c grated sharp cheddar cheese (I used medium cheddar, and a lot more that 1 cup)
Basil leaves, I chopped up about 15 basil leaves I had left over from another meal

Instructions
Cook egg noodles until al dente. Drain and set aside.

Brown ground chuck in a large skillet. Drain fat, then add tomato sauce, basil, salt and plenty of freshly ground pepper. Stir, then simmer while you prepare the other ingredients.

In a medium bowl, combine sour cream and cottage cheese. Add plenty of freshly ground black pepper. Mix with the noodles. Add green onions and stir.

To assemble, add half of the noodles to a baking dish. Top with half the meat mixture, then sprinkle on half the grated cheddar. Repeat with noodles, meat, then a final layer of cheese.
Spread the green onions a top the cheese.

Bake at 350 degrees for 20 minutes, or until all cheese is melted.

The picture at the top, well, I didn't read the last part of the instructions. So I did a layer of noodles, but didn't want too much noodle because I wanted the sauce to be on the noodles, so I added about half the sauce and cheese and then I just made a second dish. It would have fit in one dish if I'd read to layer it, like a lasagna. We ate up the first dish really quickly. I quickly snapped a photo of the second dish before we dug in. Yummy stuff.


Enjoy!