Italian Pasta Shells Stuffed with Spinach and Cheese

Italian Pasta Shells Stuffed with Spinach and Cheese

If you have some yummy spaghetti sauce on hand and want to make something different than plain ol’ spaghetti, this is a winning recipe! It’s not overly difficult to make (aside from stuffing those pesky shells) and makes a really nice meal that has all your veggies in it!

I pretty much used my recipe for my Spinach Lasagna Roll-Ups, but just changed some of the cheese amounts. I feel pretty proud of this recipe, as all the online versions I found for it made anywhere from 24 to 30 shells — way more than I wanted! I went with my gut feeling, and figured 16 shells would do the trick with the amount of stuffing I use for my roll-ups. I was SPOT ON! Woo hoo! I served this with green salad and baked garlic bread. We ate half one night, then finished the other half the next, but you can freeze the leftovers if you want.

Italian Pasta Shells Stuffed with Spinach and Cheese

16 uncooked Jumbo shell pasta
3 cups Paul’s Spicy Spaghetti Sauce, or other prepared sauce
1 15-ounce container Ricotta cheese
3/4 cup shredded Mozzarella (I used a block of low-fat and shredded it with a grater)
1/4 cup shredded Parmesan
2 teaspoons minced garlic
10-ounces frozen chopped spinach, thawed and squeezed dry
1 large egg, beaten
Ground black pepper, to taste
Salt or Mrs. Dash, to taste
Pinch of ground nutmeg
Additional shredded Mozzarella, for topping

Preheat oven to 400°F. Cook the noodles to al dente according to package directions. While the noodles are cooking, combine the Ricotta, Mozzarella, Parmesan, garlic, spinach, egg, pepper, salt or Mrs. Dash, and a pinch of nutmeg in a medium bowl.

Stuffed Pasta Ingredients Ready to Mix

When the noodles are done, drain the noodles, let cool a bit, then lay them on parchment or wax paper in a single layer.

Cooked Pasta Shells

Spread 1 cup of spaghetti sauce on the bottom of a 2-quart casserole dish. Stuff 1/4 cup or so of the cheese and spinach mixture into each pasta shell and place into the dish.

Stuffed Shells Wanting Sauce and Cheese

Pour 2 cups of spaghetti sauce over the stuffed shells. Grate additional mozzarella cheese over the top of the shells, then cover the pan with aluminum foil. Bake for 30 minutes. Uncover and turn on the broiler. Broil for about 5 to 10 minutes until cheese is bubbly.

Stuffed Shells Ready to Cook

Remove from oven and let sit for 5 minutes before serving. Serve with a green side salad and garlic bread. You can freeze the remaining shells in Ziploc bags for a quick and easy future meal. My family loved this so much we ate the rest of it up the next day!

p.s. (Please let me indulge you with photos of my daughter’s rose she got at her dance team’s end-of-year potluck celebration! That was a long journey to get through dance season with the football and basketball schedules!)

Italian Pasta Shells Stuffed with Spinach and Cheese

Download and Print this Yummy Recipe!

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The Leftovers Dilemma…

Spinach and Lasagna Roll Ups

This is actually a new post! I started this post about a year ago and shelved it. Since I’m on a somewhat “hiatus” from blogging while packing up to move onto a new house, I thought I’d update this one and finally post it. And here it goes, written a year ago:

Start: “So we are having leftovers from the freezer. Hubby says, “Stop cooking so much, we have too many leftovers!” And I replied, “Now how am I supposed to have a foodie blog without cooking?” Well, the problem is, I grew up in a household of eight, and I don’t know any better. I can’t help it! Food, food, food, and then more food.

We have three in the household. I try to cook for four because that’s just how it works out with standard halving of recipes, but I usually end up cooking for six or eight because, well, I can’t help it. Add more of this, add more of that. Ooooh, I have some of this, just throw that in too. Then you just end up with a lot. For the freezer. We just have to remember to get it OUT of the freezer and actually eat it before it’s that unknown ice-crystal-laden frozen glob of something that may or may not be the leftover spinach lasagna rollups, or is that the chicken enchiladas we made with the red sauce instead of the green sauce last time?” End.

Well that is as far as I got with that post. But I can at least present you with a photo above of  what “said glob” looked like before it went into the freezer…

We are having a garage sale this weekend, so things are moving along pretty quickly with getting moved. We have an arrangement with the owner of the house we are buying to move our stuff into his garage beginning Sept. 1, but we won’t be able to close the loan on the house until mid-October (long story on that one) and we have to be out of our rental by Sept. 12. But my parents have a one-bedroom condo here with a Murphy bed too that they stay in during the summer to escape the Texas heat. They leave on Sept. 20. SOOOO, in order not to be too cramped for those 8 days, my husband and I will be taking a week’s vacation to our river property during that time frame. Our daughter will stay at the condo with our parents since she’ll be in school by that time. Busy times ahead, for sure! I hope you all stick around my blog until we get through this!

OH! Here is a link to the spinach lasagna Roll Ups, in case you missed that post in the past: Spinach Lasagna Roll Ups

Spinach Lasagna Roll Ups

Spinach and Lasagna Roll Ups

About everyone and their brother has made this and posted it on Pinterest, BUT not everyone has made it with Paul’s Spicy Spaghetti Sauce! Paul whipped up another big batch of his sauce the other night, and I took the liberty of crafting these cute lasagna roll ups before the sauce got all bagged up for the freezer. Recipe here.

I do have a complaint of about 90% of the recipes I looked at. Most of them said to use 2 tablespoons of filling for each noodle. No-way, no-how would 2 tablespoons cover a lasagna noodle. I used at least 1/4 cup for each noodle before rolling them up. Just don’t roll them until you’ve exhausted all the filling, then you can rob Peter to pay Paul if the last couple of noodles are shy of filling.

Spinach Cheese Mixture Spread on Lasagna Noodles

Cooking a lasagna this way isn’t necessarily a time-saver, but you do end up with an easy way to package and store leftovers for the freezer. My husband said “This is really good!” so I gathered he liked this version of lasagna. So did my daughter, but she wasn’t very hungry and only ate one. More for the freezer!

NOTE: This can be made vegetarian by subbing in a marinara sauce for the meaty spaghetti sauce.

p.s. I’m traveling out of town this weekend to meet up with about 15 wild and crazy friends, so there will be no weekend post.

Spinach Lasagna Roll Ups

12 uncooked lasagna noodles
3 cups Paul’s Spicy Spaghetti Sauce, or other prepared sauce
1 15-ounce container Ricotta cheese
2/3 cup shredded Mozzarella
1/4 cup shredded Parmesan
2 teaspoons minced garlic
10-ounces frozen chopped spinach, thawed and squeezed dry
1 large egg, beaten
Ground black pepper, to taste
Salt or Mrs. Dash, to taste
Pinch of ground nutmeg
3/4 cup shredded Mozzarella, for topping
1/4 cup shredded Parmesan, for topping

Spinach Lasagna Roll Ups Ready to Bake

Preheat oven to 400°F. Cook the noodles to al dente according to package directions. While the noodles are cooking, combine the Ricotta, garlic, spinach, egg, pepper, salt or Mrs. Dash, and a pinch of nutmeg in a medium bowl.

When the noodles are done, drain the noodles, let cool a bit, pat dry with paper towels, then lay them on parchment or wax paper in a single layer.

Spread 1 cup of spaghetti sauce on the bottom of a 9 x 12 baking pan. Spread 1/4 cup or so of the cheese and spinach mixture onto each lasagna noodle. Roll the noodles and place seam-side-down into the pan.

Pour 2 cups of spaghetti sauce over the lasagna rolls. Top each roll with 1 tablespoon of Mozzarella and 1 teaspoon of Parmesan, then cover the pan with aluminum foil. Bake for 30 minutes, uncover and turn on the broiler. Broil for about 5 to 10 minutes until cheese is browned and bubbly.

Remove from oven and let sit for 5 minutes before serving. Serve with a green side salad and garlic bread. You can freeze the remaining roll ups in Ziploc bags for a quick and easy future meal!

Spinach and Lasagna Roll Ups

Download and Print this Yummy Recipe!

What to Do with Leftover Corn Beef and Other Stuff

Healthy Leftover Corned Beef, Cabbage

Saint Patrick’s Day is next Monday, and if you are like me you will cook corned beef and cabbage (or hopefully get to eat some!). I have a recipe I posted last year for what to do with the leftovers that is light and healthy that I’d like to re-share with you. I developed a soup that is not heavy at all and will help ease any over-indulgence you had the night or two before.

Get the recipe here: Healthy Leftover Corned Beef, Cabbage, and Potato Soup

Or if you are feeling adventurous, here are some corned beef fritters you can fry up! Corned Beef Fritters

Or if you want a great leftover corned beef appetizer, here’s baked version! (Just slice your corned beef thin instead of using the deli-sliced. Or shred it!) Crispy Reuben Roll-Ups

ALSO: The tallies are in and I will be making Goat’s Cheese Soufflé for my French Dish Challenge #1. I bought the ingredients last weekend and wanted to make it straight away when I got home, but much to my dismay I discovered (and then remembered) that I sold my lovely oval, fluted ramekin dishes at our garage sale two years ago.

This is what they looked like:

My Long Gone Oval Soufflé Dishes

I have the round ramekins to make the soufflé, but to finish them off you need some larger, shallower baking dishes to pour the cream and cheese over the souffles to brown up after removing them from the ramekins.

I then went on a thrift store hunt to find my dishes (OK not mine, but something similar) and ended up hitting every single thrift store in town. I found two cute CorningWare baking dishes  with handles that would work at the third thrift store, but I needed three of them! And then BAM! The next thrift store had one of the exact same ones I had just picked up. Talk about serendipity! (Down note, it cost one dollar more and was dirtier then heck on the bottom. The other two were pristine and unused-looking.)

Last but not least, I was featured in the latest Andeo organization’s emailed newsletter about my Coq Au Vin experience with our foreign exchange student Caroline! She is safe and sound back in Paris now and we really miss her! I wish I could link to the newsletter but it was an email-only version of it. But you can read the experience here if you haven’t already: Coq Au Vin.

OK that is it for my long and ramble-ish corned beef and other stuff post. Next up will be my soufflé post on the weekend. We shall see how it turns out. My husband said he raised goats in his 20s and swears goat cheese is disgusting. I hope to change his mind!

Sneak Preview ~ Diced! Competition

Crispy Reuben Roll-Ups

I have just found out (because I am so behind on my emails) that my entry for the Diced! online food cooking competition will be posted on Friday. So stay tuned. The most “Likes” on each recipe’s post for the week will move on to the next round. So I will wait until Friday to post that recipe and the link to the blog that you must “Like” in order for me to gain a vote. Please vote for me! This is an unabashed self-promoting post, lol.

Back story on this: I had to write a few sentences in an email to the host of this why I wanted to enter the competition. In short, I was selected to be a contestant. You are given three ingredients to cook a specified genre of food. The first was an appetizer, soup, or salad. The three ingredients to make something out of were Corned Beef, Corn Kernels, and Corn Flakes. So that is how I was inspired to make these Crispy Reuben Roll-Ups. And they were actually quite good! But you will have to wait for the Friday contest post to “read all about it.” 🙂

But do not go to that website and “like” any posts until you have reviewed all the recipes after Saturday, which is when the last recipe for the contest is posted. I mean, fair is fair, right? If you like someone else’s recipe better then by all means vote for that one. But, hey  c’mon. Vote for mine? XO