Monday, March 15, 2010

Spinach & Ricotta Gluten Free Pasta Bake


This dish serves 4 - perfectly. I ate 3 bowls and SD had 1 :0p This recipe is from The Australian Womans Weekly Healthy Babies Recipe Book, available from most newsagents and supermarkets. Nothing baby like about this! But SB sure helped me devour it...

Ingredients
280 grams of gf pasta (if anyone knows where to find large gf shells, please let me know! I used penne)
500g trimmed spinach (I just used a huge handful of frozen spinach as the fresh stuff looked dodgy)
600g low fat ricotta cheese
2 tablespoons of fresh flat-leaf parsley (I used about half a teaspoon)
1 tablespoon of chopped fresh mint (didn't have any)
700g bottled tomato pasta sauce
125ml (half cup) of chicken stock
2 tablespoons of finely grated parmesan cheese (I just used grated tasty)

Cook pasta as per normal (I find gf pasta takes less time to cook....).
Let it cool.
Preheat oven to 180/160 if fan forced
Boil, steam or nuke spinach until wilted. Drain. Chop it finely, squeeze out excess liquid.
Combine spinach, ricotta and herbs in a bowl. Spoon it into the pasta if you can.
Combine sauce and stock into oiled shallow 2 litre overnproof dish. Place pasta shells in dish, sprinkle with parmensan.
Bake (covered) until pasta is tender (the book says for like an hour but that seemed crazy and I was hungry. We did it for 20 mins - the last 10 mins uncovered so the cheese would brown a bit)
Let stand for 10 mins.

So I only got half the amount of ricotta required, it seems I need direction on how to write a freakin shopping list. So I added in some free range, organic chicken and it was a hit. Will totally have this again. SD is super impressed. 3 nights in a row of cooking fandangle (for me) recipes. It's SUCH a nice feeling to have both of my boys really enjoy my meals...and make happy eating noises.

Is it lame that I'm annoyed all of my recipe books aren't the same size and shape, some are cut of of magazines or cards from the supermarket? I wish they all matched and looked pretty.

Peas.
SH.

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