Recipe Review

You Should Make Creamy Beef and Shells for Dinner Tonight

published Nov 12, 2018
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(Image credit: Damn Delicious)

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Pasta is probably my favorite thing to cook for dinner. I like to stand and fuss over the sauce, and I especially love when the recipe says to adjust seasonings “to taste,” because that means I basically have carte blanche to eat my whole dinner standing over the pan, before it ever gets to the table. I don’t know how anyone resists filling up on “tastes” while stirring the pasta and sauce together — especially if the pan is full of a dreamy wonder of beef, cheese, tomatoes, and cream like this one from Damn Delicious.

Grown-ups need comfort food too, and this recipe is a slam-dunk. The sauce is a thick, rich, chunky mixture of browned beef with tomatoes, cream, and cheddar cheese that sounds like it’s the perfect solution for anyone who loves cheeseburgers and macaroni and cheese too much to ever decide between them.

Shells are the perfect pasta shape for a sauce like this, too. Those little pasta shells are great at catching the sauce and bits of ground beef, so every shell is like a little pocket full of deliciousness.

The recipe is written to serve four people, but I love to make an extra-large batch when I’m making a pasta like this one; I always feel like pasta in a thick, beefy tomato cream sauce is even better as leftovers than it is right off the stove. These sauces reheat beautifully, and the flavors just seem to get better after a night in the fridge, so lunch for the next couple days is already sorted.

Get the Recipe: Creamy Beef and Shells by Damn Delicious

(Image credit: Joe Lingeman)

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