Spaghetti Braid

A friend of mine sent me this link and recommended I try it. I did that very night and am happy to report that we have a new, easy, delicious recipe to add to our collection!

You will need these ingredients (mine are varied slightly from the original to make use of what I had in the pantry and avoid a trip to the store).  I made the dough using this recipe from Everyday Home Cook.  (We use this recipe weekly at our house.  LOVE IT!)

•  bread dough
• 1 pkg pasta
• 1 jar spaghetti sauce
• 8 oz mozzarella
• Parmesan cheese
• 1 lb ground beef (not pictured)
• Egg white from one egg (not pictured)
• Garlic powder (not pictured
• Parsley (not pictured)

(I gotta get better at this taking pictures thing!)

Brown the beef, boil and drain the noodles, and combine with sauce: 

Roll out the dough on a floured surface.

 Spoon one layer of the the pasta mixture into the center of the dough and layer with cheese. Repeat until you have used all the pasta mixture, or in my case, until the bread is full.  (I had some extra pasta left over, which I ate for lunch the following day.) Use a pizza roller to cut slits in the dough on each side (forgot to take a picture of that) and braid it up as seen below.

Beat the egg whites from one egg and brush over the top. Sprinkle with garlic and parsley and bake at 350º for half an hour.  When you remove it from the oven, it looks like this:

And when you eat half of it, it looks like this:

Take Aways:

• My husband is an easy-on-the-sauce guy, but I think I went a little too easy. I didn't use the entire jar of spaghetti sauce, but I will next time. And more cheese. This rule can be applied to most dishes, at least at our house. :)
• We ate half and wrapped the other half in foil for freezing - a quick meal next time!
• The braid approach is AMAZING and oh-so-versatile. We make bierocks and ham and cheese rolls several times a month using this recipe (also from Everyday Home Cook), but it is quite time-consuming to individually wrap each roll. This weekend I made the bierocks recipe this way and it worked great.  It is quick, and it looks cool too!