chicken pasta casserole

So Friday night I went to a fish fry at my dad's house and completely forgot about posting.  Then Saturday, I got sick from heat exposure.  Then Sunday I forgot all over again.  So here's Friday's post today.  On one hand, it's not a whole meal, but on the other hand, it's also three days late.  Yay for me!

Here's the recipe for the casserole I made as part of Andrew's birthday party last Saturday.  Oh, and by the way, yes I did find my camera, and no, all of the spaghetti was eaten.

I made a pound and a half of rigatoni (spiral noodles), which was on sale for 99 cents a pound, so that's $1.50 worth of pasta.  It was so much that I had to put it in two casserole dishes, one 9x9 and one 13x9.  I topped the pasta with a full jar of Francesco Rinaldi sauce (my favorite, on sale last week for $1.33 a jar)  I baked and diced $5.57 worth of chicken and added the red, green, and yellow diced peppers that I had frozen from this recipe, previously calculated as $1.85.  Then, I topped with a pound and a half of cheese ($6 worth), and another jar of sauce (another $1.33).

So, our total cost of a monstrous amount of casserole was $1.50 pasta + $1.85 peppers + $6 cheese + $5.57 chicken + $2.66 sauce = $17.58.  My family of four only ate half of the small dish at a sitting.  The rest I ate as leftovers or gave away to relatives.  I could have gotten 5 meals, easily out of this, so I'm going to call the price for each meal for my family as $17.58/5 = $3.52.  If I make this again, I'll do it in a loaf pan.