Creamy Pesto Pasta

Seems like these days, "recycled leftovers" has been a recurring dinner theme at home. Hence, we've been consuming a lot of eggs lately since we almost always resort to making omelettes with various food scraps.

Dinner tonight wasn't so bad. I decided to mix some light cream with the left over pesto sauce (purchased fresh pesto sauce from Costco during the lenten season, but we found it too strong as is). We mixed in the chicken meat from Swe-cha's chicken stock and topped the whole thing with bacon. All these on top of whole-wheat pasta.

Verdict: not bad.

Stuffed Shells

Sometime last year (or was it the year before ?), my friend Ayie brought us some frozen home-made lasagna rollups. She thought it would make us a good instant meal for when I get too busy or preoccupied w/ taking care of Swe-cha & was not able to prepare dinner.

Needless to say, the lasagna rollups were an instant hit. So much so that hubby requested that I try and make some myself. I did try to make some myself but it wasn't as easy as it looks. Things got messy as rolled & stuffed the lasagna sheets so I wasn't really gung-ho about doing it again.

Last week, I saw these jumbo shells in the grocery's pasta aisle and an idea hit my head. Since people were stuffing these shells anyway - usually, with cheese - why not stuff it w/ the filling similar to the lasagna rollups ?

and so... this dish was born.

Filling:

start with your standard bechamel sauce, flavor with cheddar cheese & mozzarella cheese (just keep adding cheese until it tastes right). Add chopped spinach (optional).

Shells: Prepare pasta shells according to package instructions

Meat sauce: Just prep your usual meat sauce. I made mine w/ ground beef & instant (traditional) spaghetti sauce from the jar.

To assemble, stuff the jumbo shells w/ the filling, arrange on a plate, top with sauce & cheese. Cover with foil & bake until the cheese topping is melted.

Chicken Parmesan

We were supposed to have lemon chicken for dinner tonight but when I realized that it was deep-fried and that I needed to avoid fatty & heaty foods, I decided to look for something else that I could make with the boneless, skinless chicken thighs that we were having for dinner. After checking out what we had in the refrigerator, I decided on baked chicken parmesan.

Checked the internet for recipes and looks like there are a lot of variations out there. I threw caution to the wind and picked & chose what I wanted to do. Hubby helped with this dish as well :D

Ingredients:

Boneless chicken thighs, sliced thinly (or use cutlets)

1 egg

1/4 cup breadcrumbs

1/4 cup parmesan cheese

2 tbsp chopped parsley

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.
2. Prepare the parmesan coating for the chicken by mixing equal parts of parmesan cheese & breadcrumbs (more parmesan cheese = better). Mix in the parsley.
3. Season chicken thighs with freshly ground sea salt.
4. Dip seasoned chicken thighs in egg.
5. Coat chicken with the parmesan - breadcrumb mixture.
6. Arrange chicken on a baking rack and bake until done - around 20 minutes.

We just used bottled marinara for the sauce and made some whole wheat pasta to go with the chicken.

Eggplant Parmigiana with Alfredo Sauce

Today's lunch is brought to you by the letter "L". L for leftovers.

So we still had some leftover eggplant parmigiana from the last time and I did mention that I ran out of tomato sauce, didn't I ? I rummaged around the refrigerator and found some leftover Alfredo sauce.

Guess what I did next ?

Yep, I made some rotini pasta (not leftovers, haha!) and poured the rest of the Alfredo sauce on it. Poured a little sauce on the eggplant parmigiana too and I liked how it turned out. Somehow, the tartness of the tomato sauce got balanced out by the cream sauce.

Hubby, on the other hand, is still not convinced. He prefers this the classic way - with tomato sauce - rather than my way.

Spinach Lasagna

Last month's attempt at making lasagna wasn't the success that it could've been. You see, I had the not-so-brilliant idea of adding slices of eggplant to our spinach lasagna, thinking that it was all we had to do - just add layers of eggplant. Unfortunately, if we only had taken the time to do the research, we'd find out that the eggplant had to be pre-cooked or grilled before being added to the lasagna layers.

This time, we decided to keep it simple and just stick with lasagna and cheese - you could never go wrong with that, right ?

Ingredients:

• 1 pack frozen chopped spinach
• 15 oz pack of Ricotta cheese
• 2 eggs
• 2 packs shredded mozarella cheese
• no-boil lasagna
• tomato sauce
• ground beef
• sliced onion
• chopped garlic

1. Prepare the sauce as you would normally prepare spaghetti sauce. Brown the garlic in hot oil, add the onions and caramelize. Add the ground beef, when the beef is brown, add the tomato sauce.
2. Wrapped the chopped spinach in paper towels and squeeze the water out. Do this repeatedly.
3. Mix the ricotta cheese, spinach and eggs in a container.
4. In a baking dish, coat the bottom with a little sauce to prevent the pasta from sticking to the pan. Add a layer of pasta.
5. From this point forward, we should be alternating the layers - pasta, sauce, ricotta cheese & spinach, mozzarella.
6. Cover with foil and bake in a 375 degree oven for 35 - 40 minutes. Cook uncovered in the last 10 minutes.