Peas on the Plate

In the many hours I’ve spent consuming true crime documentaries, police procedurals, and suspect interview footage, I have learned two fundamental things:

• If a cop asks you any question at all that can’t be answered with “Doing well, how about yourself?”, call a lawyer immediately and do not say another word.
• Human memory is wholly unreliable.

Hopefully I’ll never need that first point, but I’m reminded of that second one pretty frequently, usually in a very inconvenient way. Oh, did you put your keys somewhere you’d “definitely remember them?” TRY AGAIN. BECAUSE YOU WON’T.

While I’m still adjusting to being an inconvenient distance from most of my friends and family, I’m finding myself coming back to recipes that exist in good memories. Today’s happy memory is 20 years ago, with one of my friends in my parents’ old kitchen, trying to fill shells with ricotta using a pastry bag and hoping they didn’t tear. And then eating all the ones that tore. Because another thing I’ve learned from crime documentaries is that if you get rid of the evidence, no crime was committed.

Unlike that core memory, this recipe didn’t involve me making marinara sauce from scratch, which took a huge amount of the lift out, but it’s still a bit of a commitment because it requires some strategic multitasking and a few key points:

• Be sure the shells are cooled down a bit and not waterlogged when you fill them. I accomplished this by lining them up on my counter on a cutting board. They were near my open kitchen window. I literally cooled them off like a pie in a Disney movie. A little disappointed that the mouse we suspect we have didn’t come to help me make dinner and then be my best friend, but maybe he’s just watching his carb intake.
• Similarly, transfer the sausage to a plate to cool once it’s cooked through. I cooked it while waiting for the water to boil for the shells.

I figured if all the components were the same temperature, it’d be easier to handle and cook more evenly. Is that correct? How should I know? The important part was that it certainly didn’t hurt, it didn’t really increase the recipe time, and I felt a little more comfortable knowing I wasn’t accidentally burning myself or turning everything into a melty mess.

Be sure to pack up some of these and freeze to eat later. They heat up really well and there’s never a better way to fend off cold weather than with pasta and a lot of cheese.

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Stuffed Shells

Yield: 35 shells

Prep Time: 1 hour

Cook Time: 20 minutes

Total Time: 1 hour 20 minutes

Stuffed shells are a classic and they freeze really well! Scroll down to the notes to learn more about how these portion out.

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Ingredients

• 12 oz box of jumbo shell pasta
• 3 C tomato sauce of your choice
• 1 lb Italian sausage, sweet or hot
• 15 oz container of ricotta cheese
• 1 C shredded mozzarella cheese
• 3/4 C grated parmesan cheese
• 1 egg
• 4 garlic cloves, minced
• 1 tsp oregano

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 350°F. 
2. Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Cook pasta shells a little firmer than al dente and strain.
3. Rinse shells with cold water and leave upside down on a clean cutting board to drain any excess water out of them.
4. While the water and pasta are boiling, brown and fully cook the sausage, breaking it up into the smallest pieces you can as it cooks.
5. Drain the sausage and transfer to a plate to cool.
6. In a medium bowl, whip the ricotta for about 1 minute with a whisk.
7. Add parmesan, garlic, oregano, and egg to ricotta and combine. Add in a crack of salt and pepper.
8. By now, the sausage should have cooled off a bit. Add it into the ricotta mixture.
9. Use a spoon to fill the shells with ricotta filling. If you want to get slightly fancier/messier, cut a 1-inch hole in a pastry bag or corner of a large Ziploc bag. Transfer the ricotta filling to the bag and fill each shell to the top with ricotta.
10. Pour about a cup of marinara into a 9×9 baking dish, making a thin coat on the bottom of the pan.
11. NOTE: If you’re freezing some of your shells, skip the next few steps. Just put them aside and put them in a sealed container to freeze.
12. Arrange shells in the baking dish and top each one with a heaping tablespoon of marinara.
13. Layer the shells with the shredded mozzarella, adding more if it feels right (fun fact: it always feels right).
14. Bake for 20-25 minutes or until cheese is fully melted.

Notes

The portions in this recipe are weird and I'm sorry. It doesn't quite fill up a full box worth of jumbo shells, but to double the filling would end up with way too much and to 1.5 it would leave like…half a package of sausage and half a container of ricotta. If that's how you wanna roll, go for it, but I know myself well enough to know I would have ended up throwing out the rest of the sausage and ricotta and…food waste? In THIS economy?

(For the record, I just ate the extra shells with some tomato sauce and melted mozzarella and it was fine. I had about 15 leftover.)