Baked Penne with Corn, Zucchini, and Basil

The temperatures are dropping, which means we're slowly adding more Italian food to our weekly repertoire. While searching for a not-so-heavy baked dish, we happened upon a recipe for Baked Penne with Corn, Zucchini, and Basil in Williams-Sonoma's online recipes. We have yet to meet a vegetable we didn't like, so we decided to prepare it for an impromptu dinner for 5.

The ingredient line-up is a little more extensive than usual, with 4 veggies plus a punch of garlic and basil. The recipe also calls for fresh oregano, but our grocer was sadly out of stock! We opted instead to use 1/2 teaspoon of the dried variety to maintain the Mediterranean flavor.

The prep time for this recipe is extensive, gang. Each of those vegetables requires chopping, and the basil and garlic must be sliced. Then, you'll spend 25 minutes or so on sauteeing the three rounds of vegetable/spice combinations. It's not the kind of task you have to pay attention to, which allowed us to catch up with our guests as we worked.

We opted to use a large casserole dish to bake the finished product, rather than putting the pan directly into the oven as the recipe instructs. This also saved us some clean-up, because we were able to transfer every saute product from the pan into the casserole without dirtying any intermediate bowls.

Our final, assembled product took just 20 minutes to bake, and the result was a light, cheesy bowl of delicious. It also drew a lot of compliments from our guests, and really, what better reward for 60 minutes of low-intensity work?

To make this dish a little less impactful on the waistline, next time we'll sautee the vegetables with cooking spray, or at least halve the recommended 3 tablespoons of oil. Other alternatives include using less or low-fat cheese and using water or vegetable broth in place of white wine.