Spinach stuffed pasta

This is our new favorite dish:

I altered this recipe I found for spinach stuffed shells. Although this dish is a little bit time consuming because of the various steps, it's easy enough for us to put together, even on a busy weekday.

Spinach Stuffed Pasta Shells
                   yields about 4 servings, or the equivalent of a 9*13 baking dish
6 oz. Jumbo shells (we buy the 12 oz. Great Value brand at Walmart and use half a box)
1 jar (about 2 cups?) Marinara/pasta sauce of your choice (we like Del Monte Sweet Basil, but lately Thomas has been making his own pasta sauce starting with a can of stewed tomatoes)
1 c ricotta cheese OR cottage cheese (whatever's cheaper!)
~1/2 lb mozzarella cheese, grated
1 egg
grated Parmesan to taste
6-8 oz. frozen spinach, rinsed to thaw and drained (either one box or 1/2 a 16 oz. bag) (I imagine you could use fresh spinach too, but we haven't tried this)

1. Preheat oven to 375°F.
2. Boil pasta per package directions. You'll want it cooked, but not mushy; maybe a little past al dente.
3. In the meantime, combine ricotta, mozzarella, egg, Parmesan, and spinach. This will be your pasta filling. 
4. Spread a little bit of your pasta sauce around the bottom of a glass baking dish (9x9 works, but 9x13 is easier).
5. Once pasta is cooked, drain in a colander. Rinse lightly to cool (but take care not to break the pasta).
6. Spoon cheese/egg mixture into each shell pasta, roughly 3 Tbsp per pasta. Place stuffed pasta into baking dish, on top of the sauce in the bottom. 
7. Once all pasta shells are stuffed and placed into baking dish, pour remainder of pasta sauce over shells. Cover with foil and bake for about 40 minutes. Serve hot!

FREEZING INSTRUCTIONS:

Line your baking dish with foil, so you can remove the food to a freezer bag once solid. Freeze prior to baking. Thaw overnight IN THE BAKING DISH, after removing from freezer bag/plastic wrap, before baking at 375°F for about 40 minutes.

If making a large batch to freeze, these ratios work for 3, 9*13 baking dishes:

24 oz Jumbo shells

about 2, 24-oz jars sauce

24 oz (1 ½ c) cottage cheese/ricotta

1 ½ lbs mozzarella cheese, grated

3 eggs

Parmesan to taste

18-20 oz frozen spinach, rinsed to thaw and drained

Italian Wedding Soup

For our wedding, we actually had some Italian soup... but it wasn't this. It was minestrone... delicious minestrone made by my family's former neighbor Julie. ;o)

Anyway, we tried this recipe a while back for Stracciatella. I found the recipe in a cookbook I got from my mom for Christmas 2008 called Eating Better. It's a cool book because the recipes have been submitted by Home Economics & Family and Consumer Science (FACS) teachers. Thus you can trust them to be pretty doable and usually tasty.

This is a nice light soup that would be best served as an appetizer. If I were to make it again, I would probably try to stir more while adding the egg, as the egg in our soup was pretty chunky.

Stracciatella (Italian Wedding Soup)
3 1/2 cups chicken broth (I think I upped this to 4 cups, so I could use 4 bouillon cubes)
1 lb fresh spinach, washed and chopped (I had a pre-washed bag of spinach and I dumped the whole thing in as is)
1 egg
1/2 c grated Parmesan cheese (you can probably cut down on this if I recall correctly)
1 Tbsp flour
salt and pepper to taste

1. Bring 1 c of chicken broth to a boil.
2. Add spinach and cook down until soft but still bright green. The spinach will look like a lot at first but after a few minutes you will wonder where it went!
3. Remove spinach with a slotted spoon and set aside. I put all of it in a bowl - you will add it back later.
4. Add the remaining 2 1/2 - 3 cups broth to pot and bring to boil. 
5. Beat egg lightly, add 1/4 cup of Parmesan cheese and flour.
   When broth is boiling, pour in egg mixture, stirring constantly until egg "cooks into rags" as the book says... I pictured egg drop soup from a Chinese restaurant but this is not what mine looked like; again, I probably should have stirred faster or something.
6. Add the spinach back in. Season to your liking (including with the additional Parmesan cheese)

Serves 4-6 according to the book, but I think we finished this much on our own for dinner. If you are serving it with something else (pasta?) you could stretch it further.

Easy Dinner

The other day, I needed a meal that would not take long to prepare, and that could sit in the oven for an hour or longer while I went visiting teaching. I would have a short time between work and my appointment, and by the time I finished, Thomas would be home and we'd both be hungry. Considering ingredients I had at home, I decided to make this:

Breaded Baked Chicken Breasts

2 boneless skinless chicken breasts (or other chicken parts of your choice), thawed with fat etc. removed
about 1/2 cup bread crumbs (we used Italian-seasoned)
1/4 cup parmesan cheese
1-2 eggs, beaten
a little bit of butter

1. Mix bread crumbs and parmesan cheese in a shallow bowl.  Beat eggs in a second shallow bowl.
2. Once your chicken breasts are prepared as indicated above, dip them individually, first into the eggs, then into the bread crumb mixture. Once coated, repeat.
3. Place into small, lightly greased baking dish. For 2-3 chicken breasts, I use a glass loaf pan.
4. Put a little bit of butter on top of each chicken breast.
5. Bake at 350° for an hour, until juices run clear/chicken is no longer pinkish/translucent inside.
6. Serve chicken on its own with a healthy side (we chose green beans) or topped with your favorite marinara sauce. The first time I made this I had some leftover homemade marinara sauce that complimented the breaded chicken very well.

oxox