Spinach Manicotti

Tonight I was able to cook the manicotti that I had made last night. It made for a very easy dinner tonight and I am pleased to say it was really good!

Here it is right out of the oven and all bubbly.....can you smell that?? It was divine.

The nice thing about this recipe was that you didn't cook the manicotti pasta first. From what I hear, filling slippery, fragile noodles is tricky. Tonight we had the manicotti with a fresh salad from the farm. I added some feta, olive oil and balsalmic vinegar.

It was a great way to use the spinach. Although the recipe contains quite a bit of spinach, it tasted very mild.

Proof of the mild taste of the spinach...

The verdict:

Produce: Spinach

Recipe: Spinach Manicotti

Zack: Good!

Heather: Great!

Gavin: Awesome! 5 star!

Brenna: Good (except for the green bits). Do you see a trend here?

Recipe

Spinach Manicotti

INGREDIENTS
1 (15 ounce) container ricotta cheese
A bunch of spinach. I have no idea how much I had. I filled up a medium sized bowl with the uncooked spinach. After I cooked it (see below) there was probably 1 1/2 cups -2 cups of spinach
1 egg
2 teaspoons minced fresh parsley (I just pulled some parsley off the stems with my fingers and tore them. Do you really want to measure 2 tsps of parsley??)
1/2 teaspoon pepper
1/4 teaspoon garlic powder
1 1/2 cups shredded mozzarella cheese, divided
1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese, divided
2 (26 ounce) jars spaghetti sauce
1 (8 ounce) package manicotti shells

DIRECTIONS
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Cook spinach in a couple of tablespoons of water in a large skillet. Cook for a few minutes until wilted down. Squeeze the water out of it before using.
In a large bowl, combine ricotta, spinach and egg. Season with parsley, pepper and garlic powder. Mix in 1 cup mozzarella and 1/4 cup Parmesan. Spread 1 cup sauce in the bottom of a 9x13 inch baking dish. Stuff uncooked manicotti shells with ricotta mixture, and arrange in a single layer in the dish. Cover with remaining sauce. Sprinkle with remaining mozzarella and Parmesan.
Bake in preheated oven for 45 to 55 minutes, or until noodles are soft.
Note
If refrigerating overnight, do so after step 3. Remove from the refrigerator 30 minutes before baking.

To fill the manicotti shells, I put the ricotta mixture in a large ziploc bag and cut a small hole. When I was almost done, I cut a bigger hole because I thought it would go faster. That was not so! It just made it messier.

Next time I am going to make two and freeze one.

Leftover Roasted Chicken

I wanted to mention that after our delicious roasted chicken the other night, I made chicken salad sandwiches with the leftovers. For someone who doesn't like to eat the dark meat outright, it is a great way to use it all up. I cut up all the leftover chicken and mixed in mayo, a little bit of lite sour cream, and just a touch of sugar. If I would have had added some grapes if I would have had them! I put the chicken salad on some wheatberry bread, but using croissants really can send a chicken salad sandwich over the edge.

Spinach

Tonight I used my spinach from the farm for spinach manicotti. We didn't have time to eat it tonight after getting home late from the farm, so I put it in the dish in the fridge and will cook it tomorrow. This recipe was nice because you didn't have to cook the pasta first. I will share the recipe if it tastes good!

The recipe called for frozen cooked spinach, so I cooked my fresh spinach and used that.

Roasted chicken

Tonight I made my very first roasted chicken. I got the chicken from the CSA and I was so excited to try it out. I have always heard how easy it is to roast a chicken, but had never tried it. Getting the chicken from the CSA was the perfect opportunity to try it out. I had planned on making it this weekend and it worked out well because we ended up eating with my mother in law and grandmother in law.

I googled some recipes, but I wanted to do something really simple. I ended up brining it for several hours first. I put the chicken in a big bowl, filled it with water and added about 1/4 cup kosher salt. The chicken was brined for about 3 hours. Afterwards, I rinsed it well. I rubbed melted butter all over the outside and inside of the chicken and then salted and peppered it inside and out. I also put some butter and seasoning under the skin, over the breasts. I roasted it at 425 for 20 min and then 375 for 1 more hour. I turned it upside to rest so that the juices would run into the breasts.

Now, I had found a recipe for a sauce reduction that looked pretty easy, so I wanted to give it a try. This ended up being the hit of the dinner! After I took the chicken out of the pan, I took out the big pieces of anything and then took out as much fat as I could with a spoon. Next I deglazed with some white wine. I put the pan right on a burner and added 1 1/2 cups of chicken stock and boiled it down until it was syrupy. Added another 1 1/2 cups of stock and boiled it down until it was about 3/4 cups. As a reduction it is different from a gravy in that it is very intense in flavor....and really good. Zack wants me to make another chicken just so he could have that sauce again!

I also got to share some of our farm fresh produce with my mother in law and grandmother in law. We made a nice big salad with some of the black seeded simpson and spinach. A little blue cheese, olive oil and balsalmic vinegar and we had us one tasty salad.

The roasted chicken was incredibly easy and very very good. We also had bread out of the oven, corn, garlic mashed potatoes (roasted a bulb of garlic for an hour in the oven with the chicken, squeeze the garlic out of the bulb like toothpaste right into the potatoes), salad and mother in law made some really good brownies for dessert! It was a great meal.

Spinach

Tonight I used a new recipe that I had found to use the spinach we got in our CSA share. Spinach fritters. Seemed like an interesting and easy way to use spinach. And kid friendly. They were very much like a "spinach pancake". One of the neighborhood kids was here and said that she had never tried spinach because it was gross. So I let her try one and she said it was pretty good!

They were pretty plain and didn't have a lot of flavor. Which is a good kid thing, right?

I had no idea what to entree to make with spinach fritters, but I wanted to make chicken parmesan sometime this week. Last week I had bought some homemade bread from Amanda's Cafe and used the leftovers to make bread crumbs this weekend. I thought chicken parmesan would be a good way to use up those bread crumbs. It was the first time I had made real chicken parmesan (I have a really good not real recipe if anyone wants it!). Zack was thoroughly impressed that I had made it from scratch, so I didn't want to tell him it was pretty easy. I would like to point out that we are eating whole wheat pasta even though it doesn't look like it! (which is a good kid thing too!)

The fritters ended up being a great thing to eat with chicken parmesan since it was so saucy. We dipped the fritters in the sauce and they were a good substitue for garlic bread.

Brenna was pretty irritated when she found a spinach pancake on her plate. But she ended up saying she really liked them! Well, "except for the green parts of course" (she said with a full mouth).

Prodcue: Spinach

Recipe: Spinach Fritters

Dad: "eh"

Mom: plain on their own, but good with sauce to dip in. What do I do now with 15 leftover spinach pancakes?

Gavin: "Awesome!"

Brenna: "Good"