How to be a Foodie: Baked Lemon Pasta

We are on a roll at our house with the Pioneer Woman recipes. I haven't been steered wrong yet. I made this last week for dinner when I didn't feel like running to the market for something or making "it's not delivery...it's DiGiorno" pizza (again). It is quite lemon-y, which cuts through the heaviness of the sour cream and cheese. To paraphrase my least favorite television cooking person, "Yum-O!".

PW's recipe is here. For those of you too lazy to click on the link, the recipe is as follows:

Baked Lemon Pasta

1 pound thin spaghetti
1/2 stick (4 tablespoons) butter
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 cloves garlic, minced
Juice of 1 lemon
Zest of 1 lemon
2 cups sour cream
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt, more to taste if desired
Plenty of grated Parmesan cheese
Flat leaf parsley, chopped
Extra lemon juice

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Cook spaghetti until al dente. In a skillet, melt butter with olive oil over LOW HEAT. When butter is melted, add minced garlic. Squeeze lemon juice into the pan. Turn off heat. Add sour cream and stir mixture together. Add lemon zest and salt. Taste, then add more salt if necessary. Pour mixture over drained spaghetti and stir together, then pour spaghetti into an oven safe dish.

Bake, covered, for 15 minutes. Then remove foil and bake for an additional 7 to 10 minutes.(Don’t bake too long or the pasta will dry out.) When you remove it from the oven, squeeze a little more lemon juice over the top. Top generously with Parmesan cheese, then chopped parsley. Give it a final squeeze of lemon juice at the end.

My notes: I never have fresh lemons or limes on hand when I need them, so I used bottled lemon juice (gasp!) and the zest of an orange instead. I also used dried parsley instead of fresh, since parsley in our house that isn't used the day it is bought is eventually found 2 weeks later, in a Ziploc bag in the back of the refrigerator, swimming in suspicious brown-colored parsley juice.

I added some poached shrimp to make it a little more substantial and the next few times I had it for lunch, I added some shredded roasted chicken breast. Good stuff.