Kitchen Construction: Baked Pasta with Butternut Squash and Ricotta

In my efforts to cook every casserole on Weight Watchers website on my road to becoming the Casserole Queen, a few weeks ago I made Weight Watcher's Baked Pasta with Butternut Squash and Ricotta, and it was a smash.  I've done a lot of cooking from the Weight Watchers recipes over the past few months and while most have been very tasty, not only did I find this recipe delicious, my fiance loved it even though it was made with wheat pasta, which he calls "dirt pasta" and generally avoids.  The only downside to this recipe is that it took me forever to make this: it took me around 2 hours (maybe more?) to make this while the recipe says that preparation time is 25 minutes (haha!) and baking time is 60 minutes (ha!).  However, it doesn't bother me too much when my casseroles take a long time as I only cook one a week on the weekends.

To start the recipe calls for you to roast pre-cubed butternut squash on a baking sheet.  Fresh Direct (my online grocery) did not have pre-cubed butternut squash, so I ended up just roasting it whole and scooping the squash out of its skin.

Doing it this way made it a bit more labor intensive as I had to scoop the squash out and avoid the seeds, but I doubt it added too much time (to what was already a very time intensive dish!).  Here's my gratuitous cooking-blogger-displays-all-her-ingredients photo:

If I was an organized cooking blogger, this would actually be a photo of all my ingredients, but as I'm a disorganized cook (see previous posts) this is missing the squash, the pasta, and the walnuts.

After I smushed up all the squash and made the squash-milk sauce, I combined that with the pasta and put it in the casserole dish to bake.  After baking for 15-20 minutes (ha! try 25) I took it out and here's what it looked like:

Tasty!  As is usual, I paired my serving with a side salad.  My fiance paired his serving with a side of another serving.

It was really tasty and extremely filling for 7 points.  Some of the recipe reviewers on Weight Watchers said that the thyme was overpowering, but I found it to be the extra addition that made this more than a boring pasta dish.  

Here are my ratings:

Ease of Preparation: B-

Cook Time: B

Taste: A+

Fiance Rating: A

Despite the time it took to put it together, this recipe was a resounding success and I highly recommend it.