This is one of those meals that gets to be both luxurious and everyday. It's also a way to help clean out the fridge and to enjoy a tasty meal. We had ricotta, eggplant and mushrooms that we needed to use up. Shells always seem a little more manageble than lasagna when it's just the two of us. I sauted diced onions, garlic, mushrooms, eggplant and the first fresh spinach of this year's farmers market season and combined that with the ricotta to be spooned into the shells. The thing was that this wasn't quite enough material for a full pan (16 shells; enough for both tonight and leftovers for the both of us), so I went and grabbed the cream cheese that Julie had placed in the freezer some time back, figuring that its now granulated texture would fit with the ricotta. This turned out to be a mistake, though not a horrible one: the cream cheese cut into the sweetness of the ricotta and made the filling too saucy, but it was still tasty. I prepped them this far and then picked up Julie from work and she came and helped me fill them. Then bake in a 400 degree oven (put about a third of a jar of pasta sauce in the bottom of the pan and another third over the top, before topping them with shredded parmesean and mozzarella). We went away and sweated for about an hour around Lake Calhoun before returning to remove them from the oven and work on the salad (oh, we also tented some tinfoil over the shells to keep the cheese from browning too much, then removed it for the last ten minutes).
The salad was one of those great everyday salads with our simple mustard vinagrette and a little bit of whatever thrown on (in this case, fennel fronds and toasted pumpkin seeds).
The Malbec was our replacament wine from Trader Joe's. It was incredibly fruity and almost sweet. We probably should have gone for something a little drier for this meal, but it was tasty none the less.
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