BLT Pasta
Last night, we made BLT pasta for dinner. My friend Tria had linked an NPR article talking about quick summer pastas, and it reminded me of a pasta I used to make in college, a riff off of BLTs. This version, however, was kicked up a few notches, using pancetta instead of bacon, and some fresh buffalo mozzarella instead of whatever cheese I had on hand. It was a quick and dirty dinner – I think it took maybe 20 minutes to create for the two of us, because I had roasted some good grape tomatoes the day before, for paninis.
Read MoreStuffed Shells
Dinner tonight was pretty simple — pasta shells filled with mushrooms, spinach, ricotta, sun dried tomatoes, and baked with marinara; garlic bread; slacker garden salad. The recipe for the pasta shells (if you want to call it that): 12 (cooked) shells (enough for dinner + a lunch) filled with: 1 C of (skim) ricotta, 4 mushrooms (roughly diced), 5oz chopped spinach (we used previously frozen, so you’d have to wilt it first), 3 sundried tomatoes (minced), 1-2 cloves of garlic (minced), 1/2-1 tsp oregano/basil/parsley, generous pinch of crushed red pepper, pinch of salt, about 1/4tsp onion powder. In theory, you should use an egg to bind it, but I really didn’t think it needed it, so I left it out.
The stuffing was reallly similar to a Greek-y stuffing we use in pork or chicken and it could probably be used for that, too.
Read MoreSausage, chicken, and mushroom manicotti with tomato salad
This recipe is from cuisine at home, one of the few cooking rags that I actually subscribe to. It’s one of my favorite manicotti recipes – and it is even better the next day.
I recently made it into lasagna, which worked out pretty well — keeping the cheeses separate from the meats for the layers.
I apologize for the brevity, but these are my notes; my ‘zine is back at my parents’.
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