Pizza Macaroni and Cheese with Leftover Holiday Ham
Your meals should be good, otherwise why would you bother making them?
One of my favorite foods is pizza! I think I could eat pizza until I passed out.
So when considering how to integrate our leftover ham into our next meal, this sounded like a perfect combination.
I could either make a pizza and dot it with our leftover ham, which actually sounds wonderful, or I could make a pasta dish with him.
Pasta just seemed to make sense for a nice quick meal with hardy any work. Pizza would have taken just a bit longer.
It was so easy to toss pasta into some boiling water and mix in the right ingredients. Voila!
It only takes 30 minutes and is a great meal that you can serve your whole family. I think the leftover ham was the absolute best part of the whole meal. lol
If you'd like to do it a little bit differently, you could make a cheese sauce on the side to add to your pasta before adding your pasta sauce.
The pasta sauce could even be added just on top of the cheesy pasta. Have fun with this!
Cook Time
Ingredients
- 1 half bag elbow pasta
- 1 regular bottle pasta sauce, any flavor
- 2 tablespoons oregano
- 1/2 cup parsley
- 1 1/2 cups shredded cheese
- 1 cup leftover ham, chopped
Instructions
- Fill a medium soup pot with water and set it to boil on the stove. It might take about 10 minutes or so.
- When boiling, dump a half a bag of elbow pasta into your water.
- Turn the temperature down to medium, mix your pasta and water thoroughly with wooden spoon, and slowly boil it until your pasta is soft, about 10 minutes or so.
- Strain in a colander in the sink when fully cooked and turn the heat off on the stove.
- Return your noodles to the original pot and set it back on the stove.
- Add your chosen flavor of pasta sauce to your pasta. I started with a half a cup and kept adding until I was happy with the consistency and taste. I ended up with about 2 cups of sauce; almost the entire bottle.
- Then add your oregano. Once again, I started with 1 tablespoon, but felt like it needed another tablespoon to be right.
- Add your shredded cheese and mix thoroughly. We like to use white cheese as it has less fat than yellow/orange cheese.
- The heat of the pasta will heat everything up and melt the cheese.
- If it looks like the cheese isn't mixing in, and instead is sticking to the spatula, add a 1/2 cup of milk to help it mix in.
- Just before adding the ham, add in your parsley and mix well.
- Now add your chopped leftover ham and mix in.
- Now serve and enjoy!
- We topped ours with more sauce and some Parmesan cheese. Yum!
Nutritional Information
| Nutrition Facts | |
|---|---|
| Serving size: 1 cup of pasta | |
| Calories | 570 |
| Calories from Fat | 315 |
| % Daily Value * | |
| Fat 35 g | 54% |
| Saturated fat 17 g | 85% |
| Carbohydrates 36 g | 12% |
| Fiber 2 g | 8% |
| Protein 29 g | 58% |
| Sodium 960 mg | 40% |
| * The Percent Daily Values are based on a 2,000 calorie diet, so your values may change depending on your calorie needs. The values here may not be 100% accurate because the recipes have not been professionally evaluated nor have they been evaluated by the U.S. FDA. | |
Personal Review
I'm always trying out new recipes, and this was one I was craving last night.
It sounded wonderful. I LOVE pizza, and I loved our leftover ham from New Years.
My husband gets ham and pineapple on his pizza all the time. This was pretty much the same thing. Being a sweet ham cooked in fruit and honey, it would mimic that ham and pineapple flavor.
Well, it ended up tasting a bit weird. Don't get me wrong. It was good, but just a different kind of flavor.
We topped it with a little extra pasta sauce and shredded cheese and it was pretty good.
While cooking this meal, I guarantee you're going to adjust the amount of each and every ingredient in this recipe to your liking.
I started with half a cup of pasta sauce and just kept adding as the pasta was seeming to absorb it all. I started with one tablespoon of oregano, and ended up adding another tablespoon and parsley to make it taste just right.
But isn't that the point of any good recipe? To taste it and adjust it to match your families desires?
I know you'll enjoy this! You can even try adding different kinds of meat to switch it up a tad.
