268. Italian food is lovely! Always satisfying and delicious. While shopping the other day, I found a pack of specialty pasta shells made with semolina, beet and spinach pastas. My mind went immediately to the delightful meal of stuffed pasta shells.
My recipe is similar to many family recipes, and each is as different as the family it comes from. So I picked up a large 16 oz container of ricotta cheese, a pound of mozzarella, grated parmesan cheese, sauce and ground meat. After a pot of sauce was made with meatballs, I began to prepare my filling for the shells...and slightly boiled the pasta shells and rinsed and set them aside to cool.
I mix the entire container of ricotta cheese, 1 egg, 1 cup shredded mozzarella cheese, 1/2 cup parmesan cheese, salt, pepper, parsley and a couple shakes of garlic salt.
I covered the bottom of a baking dish with sauce. Then I set up an assembly line. One scoop, about 2 Tablespoons, into each pasta shell is adequate.
Continue to fill the entire bottom. Drizzle more sauce over the shells and finish using all the filling in the remaining shells. Then cover with the remaining shredded mozzarella cheese and cover with tin foil.
Bake 350 degrees for about 40 minutes. Then remove the tin foil and continue to bake till the cheese is beginning to brown.
Serve the shells hot, with meatballs, sausage, bread and salad.
Sooooo gooood!
"Give us this day our daily taste. Restore to us soups that spoons will not sink in and sauces which are never the same twice. Raise up among us stews with more gravy than we have bread to blot it with. Give us pasta with a hundred fillings."
~Robert Farrar Capon
