Sour cream noodle bake

First off...we have hit another milestone!! We have well over 10k views on the blog after this weekend...that's ten thousand.  Wowza!! I do understand that the blogs I like to read, like Kristin's at Iowa Girl Eats, gets 25k views PER DAY, but I am pretty proud that over 10,000 times someone thought they may want to see what I wrote that day....anyway, back to business!  :)

I saw this first on the Pioneer Woman's blog, and have since seen a lot of others try it, all with stellar recommendations.  If you aren't familiar, the Pioneer Woman (Ree Drummond) is basically a rock star of the food blogging world, and is soon to have her own tv show...think Martha Stewart but with more butter.  She is def not considered a skinny kid food proponent...it's all about taste for her! Her and Paula Deen would get along swimmingly.  If you want to check her out, click here.

There are ways to skinny things up though, like the substitution of whole wheat pasta, and light or fat free cottage cheese and sour cream, even turkey instead of ground beef.  I made this for Brother Ben's farewell from the states again meal last week, and it was alright but I would have made a couple improvements for the next time.  I would add twice the pasta sauce, and more of the sour cream as well...it was a bit dry since I think I used more noodles.  Otherwise, I would compare this to lasagna with a different noodle...pretty standard pasta bake meal...yumtastic with some fresh basil and crushed red pepper on top (because who can really ever have enough pasta recipes in their rolodex)!

1 lb ground beef or turkey
1/2 cup sour cream (fat free)
1 and 1/4 cup small curd cottage cheese (fat free)
1 cup 2% grated cheddar cheese
1 can fave pasta sauce (I used my homemade pasta sauce)
1 bag no yolk egg noodles (I used whole wheat rotini because I had it in the cupboard)

Preaheat oven to 350 degrees.  Brown the meat in a skillet, drain, and then add the pasta sauce. Boil your noodles until al dente and then drain and combine with sour cream and cottage cheese.  To assemble, grease a baking dish and layer half the noodle mixture, then half the meat mixture, then the rest of the noodle mixture, then the rest of the meat mixture, and top with cheddar cheese! Bake for 20 minutes and you should be good to go!