I found recipes online and made modifications. Is that cheating? I mean what are all food blogs for anyway.
What you need:
Jumbo Shells or Manicotti tubes.
Cheese: I used ricotta, fontina, fresh mozzarella and parmesan and a medium/large bag of shredded mozzarella (for the top).
Eggs
Spices
Red sauce: jar or make your own. I got my sister-in-law to make her awesome red sauce with Italian sausage. Also the sauce from Lasagna will work.
Every recipe I read said to boil the noodles first. Fuck that. I don’t have time to boil noodles then stuff sad limp dick noodles and then bake them. Remember how all noodles are oven ready? Well this is a good time to use that gem of wisdom. I assure you the moisture from the sauce will make the noodles soft but not too soft. You know al dente as the fancy people like to say. If you are at all worried about the liquid content in the sauce put in some wine.
Mix the ricotta, fontina, fresh mozzarella and half the parmesan. I recommend using a food processor. add in eggs so that it moves around the bowl and doesn’t become one big lump of cheese. Add some salt and Italian spices.
Scoop cheese into a piping bag or a gallon size zip-lock.
Put some sauce on the bottom of your casserole dish or whatever the fuck you’re baking these things in.
“Pipe” the cheese into the noodles…or scoop it in…just get it in to the fuckers. These may be hard with some of the jumbo shells because of the shape. For those I just put them in and said they were “meat stuffed” since the sauce(which had meat) will go on top. Fill up your dish with the stuffed noodles and then put all the sauce on top. I added a little wine so I could justify opening the bottle. Cover with the shredded mozzarella and leftover parmesan. Cover with foil.
Bake at 3500F till you see bubbles (or finish a bottle of wine, you know 60 mins). Remove foil and bake till cheese browns. This might seem familiar. That’s because it is lasagna with slightly different noodles and cheese. You could use this cheese mix in lasagna!
My middle kid called the jumbo shells slugs and wasn’t a fan. He also then referred to the whole dish as slugs at the top of his 4 year old lungs. That’s a super pleasant family dinner. The other kids were cool to eat it if we called it lasagna, which we did. And since some shells were cooked without cheesy stuffing, I had happy dairy-free family members too, even if they now had the image of slugs in their minds. And you do too! You’re welcome.
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