Stuffed Shells

I had a suggestion on the Facebook page to make something Italian with sausage. My Essential Mormon Cookbook however did not have such a dish but I still opted for something Italian, but without the sausage.  The dish was called Stuffed Shells and about half way through I thought that instead of getting Stuffed Shells, I'd be eating something that was just stuffed up pasta.

A vegetarian friendly meal, this dish has no meat; which suited me fine as I didn't feel like meat. The dish is essentially just cottage cheese and (frozen) spinach stuffed into large pasta shells but when I got to the shops, they didn't have any jumbo sized pasta shells so I opted for the pasta that is wound into a spiral; with a view to somehow keeping them round and then filling them with the stuffing. I thought that was pretty creative!

Apart from the cottage cheese and spinach filling, I also had to make the Pasta Fasta sauce. I had made that before when I made the Meatballs with Sauce. I won't write about making the sauce as that is covered off in the meatballs blog post.

A super easy dish to make you just mix some low fat cottage cheese and (cooked) frozen spinach together and stuff it into the pasta, pour over the sauce and bake it. I also felt like another vegetable so I grated a zucchini into the mix.

I am not a big fan of frozen spinach, it tastes grassy to me....but I forgot about that when deciding on this dish (oops).

My idea to use the pasta wound into a spiral at first was good but once in the boiling water they started to unravel. To prevent them from just becoming like normal spaghetti, I only half cooked them and then quickly cooled them under running water and placed them carefully in the baking dish. I then "stuffed" each spiral of pasta with the filling and then poured over the Pasta Fasta sauce.

To serve up, I simply scooped out one of the stuffed spirals. What I didn't bank on was the amount of liquid the pasta would absorb (given it was not fully cooked). I should have added a couple of extra spoonfuls of the sauce as the finished product was a little dry.

I'd make this dish again but use less spinach and perhaps more zucchini...and thinking about it, crumble a vegetable stock cube to the stuffing mix for some extra flavour.

Category	Stuffed Shells
Ease of preparation	Easy
Time from prep to table	90 minutes
Taste	Grassy and a little bland, but still oddly all right.
Visual appeal	Good.
Radicality (i.e variation from my normal cuisine) out of 5	2
Recipe enhancement tips	Vegetable stock cube, grated zuchini
Final assessment	A safe dish and will experiment with it again.