Spaghetti A La Philly

When I first saw the commercial for this on t.v. a few years back, I thought to myself, “Gross!”.  Because I didn’t eat cream cheese in any shape or form, I didn’t think putting it in spaghetti was going to be something that I would EVER do.  Boy was I wrong!  Eventually, I looked up the recipe online and followed it, but like most people, ended up making it a few different times, tweaking it to fit our own personal taste.

I tried different amounts of pasta, different brands of sauces; I tried more ground beef, Italian sausage, with mushrooms, without mushrooms; but in the end, we finally settled on the most simplest of variations and it has now become the ONLY way we eat spaghetti.  Even my son, who is a picky eater, will eat two bowls of it in one sitting!

We use 1 lb of ground beef, 12oz of thin spaghetti, 1 26.5oz can of Hunt’s Traditional spaghetti sauce and 1 8oz block of cream cheese (any brand).

So brown the ground beef in a skillet and while it’s cooking, start boiling your salted water in a pot for the spaghetti.  When the ground beef is cooked, drain the grease from it, add the spaghetti sauce to it.  Next add the cream cheese to the sauce (you can cube it if you’d like to make it “melt” faster) and stir while on medium heat until it’s all melted and combined.  Don’t forget to watch your water, once it’s boiling, add your spaghetti noodles to it.  When your sauce is combined properly, it should look something like this:

Once your spaghetti noodles are cooked to your desired consistency, drain them, put them back in the pot and then pour the spaghetti sauce over it.  Mix well and serve.

It is the addition of the cream cheese to the sauce that makes it really smooth and creamy and because of this, we find that we no longer have to add grated Parmesan cheese to top it off.  Give it a try, you will be pleasantly surprised.