Cooking

I've finally realized what I should have been doing for years, and offered my mom one night a week on which she doesn't have to cook. My night is Tuesday, and so far I've done 4 meals. I had thought that I should post something about each weeks efforts, but I've forgotten until now. Tonight I made Pasta Shells Florentine - found the recipe on http://allrecipes.com/, and it worked out well! Everyone seemed to like it, and I thought it was quite satisfying as well. Here's a picture from online:

Here's the recipe:

Ingredients

16 jumbo pasta shells
1 (10 ounce) package frozen chopped spinach, thawed and drained
6 ounces low fat mozzarella cheese, shredded
1 cup low-fat cottage cheese
1 egg white
1 tablespoon grated Parmesan cheese
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
2 tablespoons Italian seasoning
1 (16 ounce) jar spaghetti sauce

Directions

In a large pot of salted water boil pasta shells until al dente. Drain well and rinse.

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F (175 degrees C). In medium bowl, combine spinach, mozzarella cheese, cottage cheese, egg white, parmesan cheese, nutmeg, and Italian seasoning until blended.

Fill each pasta shell with a heaping tablespoon of spinach mixture. Pour 1 cup spaghetti sauce into a 8x12 inch baking dish, spread evenly. Place shells in pan. Spoon remaining spaghetti sauce over shells. Cover with aluminum foil and bake for 30 to 40 minutes, or until shells are heated through.

I made a few changes though; for one thing, I added some sauteed onion, garlic and carrots to the cheese mixture, and used about a third of the Italian seasoning the recipe called for. Then I used canned Hunt's tomato sauce with some added browned ground turkey to give the recipe just a bit more substance as a main dish. Oh, and I just realized that I completely left out the egg white.

This recipe yields 4 servings, but the nice thing about All Recipes, is that you can just plug in the number of servings you want and the site will re-calculate the recipe to reflect the necessary ingredients. I was cooking for 6, but since I hadn't cooked the recipe before and wanted to make sure there was enough, I increased the desired servings to 8. Judging by how much we had leftover, I would think that it was a pretty accurate reflection of servings.

If it looks good to you, you should try it - it IS good!