The Last Minute Pasta Shells Experiment

The other night Mr. Dcgal and I were planning on grilling.  We had our meat, sides, and everything ready for a delicious meal.  We came home from work to a torrential downpour!  Some times I think the worst thing in the world is spending the day dreaming about food that in the end you can't have!  

Now we need a new meal.   I learned early on that Italian food is the easiest path to a happy Mr. Dcgal, and I had a box of shells left in the pantry.  Most of the other ingredients I had, as we have pasta so much around here, it always pays to have extra everything!  We did swing by the store to get some garlic bread.  Now, I used those shells previously to try Ree Drummond's recipe.  Now, while it was great, it was a lot of cheese.  A LOT.  The sauce came out really well, so I wanted to do a version of this with maybe a little meat and spinach.

I followed her recipe closely, however I made the sauce with sausage and cooked ground beef separately for the shells.  I also sautéed spinach for the shells also.

For the filling, I weighed the cheese and made the filling as the recipe described.

 I cooked the shells, slightly undercooked since they would be baked.   I thought the best order for stuffing the shells would be ground beef first, then spinach, and then the cheese to seal it all.

Then I put a little of the sauce down and started laying down the shells.

How do I rotate pictures on this thing?

Much better!

Because I added the meat and the spinach, this recipe made two trays of shells!  They will get eaten in this house though!  I placed both trays in the oven, and put the bread on the bottom rack.

It smells so good!  It's making me hungry.

Done!

So this was a pretty quick and easy experiment!  I was finished in about 45 minutes, including baking time which I mostly used to clean up and prep for plating.    Not bad for an emergency meal!

Lessons learned:  I inexplicably cooked the ground beef  with garlic and Italian seasoning...and that is it. In the future, I will probably add tomato paste, so that it has a little more flavor.  It came out a bit bland in comparison to every thing else.  So delicious though!