What's for dinner: Spinach and ricotta manicotti
Posted by 3Dsound at Sunday, May 11, 2008 5:51 PM and is filed under Food,draggin' the line,Vegetarian,What's for dinner,Recipe 
7th in a food series (hyperlink updated)
Draggin' the line
Manicotti is one of those dishes that's easy to make but hard to get right. At least, that's my experience.
I've tried a couple of different fillings for the manicotti pasta – different mixtures of cheese and a mixture containing sausage. Those versions turned out OK. But the filling that my daughter and I agree is without doubt the best appeared in the Coloradoan a few weeks ago (Howie Rumberg [23-Apr-08], Manicotti made easy: Lasagna sheets save trouble of filling pasta tubes, Coloradoan [Fort Collins, Colorado], page B1).
The Coloradoan article includes not only the recipe but, in addition, a series of suggestions for overcoming the extreme difficulty that the article claims mere mortals experience, when trying to stuff a filling into a manicotti pasta tube. My daughter wanted to try the article's suggestion of using lasagna sheets (on which you'd spread the filling, followed by rolling-up the sheets and then cutting them into sections), but that sounded like torture to me. The article's other suggestions were equally painful to imagine doing.
What the article got right is the inclusion of pecorino sheep's milk cheese in the spinach-cheese filling. Terrific! Heavenly! We're converted – and we think you will be, too.
Ingredients
2 egg yolks ($1.97 per dozen Grade AA extra large eggs)
salt and ground black pepper, to taste
2 cup part-skim ricotta cheese ($2.89 per 2 cup)
2 cup grated + 1 cup grated I Buonatavola brand Cacio de Roma semi-soft pecorino cheese ($10.99 per pound)
1 cup grated + ½ cup grated Argentine Parmesan cheese ($7.99 per pound)
12 ounce ovoline (¼-pound balls) fresh mozzarella cheese, divided ($4.99 per 12 ounce)
10 ounce chopped frozen spinach ($0.88 per 10-ounce box, on sale), thawed and thoroughly drained
8-ounce box manicotti pasta ($3.39 per 8-ounce box) (14 pasta tubes, although the filling may extend to only 9-11 tubes)
½ tablespoon butter
24 ounce marinara sauce ($2.50 per 24-ounce jar, on sale)
Procedure
Cook pasta according to package directions. Drain.
Meanwhile, heat oven to 350°F. Use butter to grease a 13 × 9 × 2-inch baking dish.
Dice one of the ovoline balls of mozzarella into small cubes, enough to produce a cup or more. Set aside. Cut the remaining mozzarella into ¼-inch-thick slices. Set aside.
In a large bowl, stir together egg yokes, salt and pepper, ricotta cheese, spinach, 2 cup pecorino cheese, 1 cup parmesan cheese, and the diced mozzarella cheese. Use your fingers to put the mixture into cooled pasta tubes (think of this as being fun, rather than the major engineering project that the Coloradoan article makes it out to be).
Pour some marinara sauce onto the bottom of the prepared baking dish. Arrange filled pasta in a single layer in the dish. Pour remaining sauce over the pasta. Place mozzarella cheese slices on top, and then sprinkle with 1 cup pecorino cheese and ½ cup parmesan cheese.
Bake 30-35 minutes. Remove from the oven, and let rest for five minutes before serving.
What's for dinner? See the series.
Well truly, these recipes are looking really good. But they make me laugh when I come here.
I think I need to do the Last FM thing.
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(a) Good!
(b) Yes (it's free, or very cheap)
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