Comfort Food For a Monday Night!

I am an avid list maker. I make grocery lists, menu lists for a week's worth of food, to-do lists, gift-shopping lists, if there is a list to be made - I am in the shadows making it (or out in the open sometimes - I'm crazy like that!) Anyway - wanting to make something Italian for dinner soon (because it's Ronnie's favorite and a sure way to make him eat up all of his dinner) while making my grocery list I couldn't decide on a lasagna or manicotti. Manicotti won after asking some people for their opinions and HERE WE GO: Manicotti comin' right at cha!

This manicotti is extremely simple and actually comes together fairly quickly. I paired the manicotti with a new garlic bread recipe I spied on allrecipes.com, Roasted Garlic Bread - and YUM-O, am I glad I did! To start the meal out, I cut the top halves off of 3 bulbs of garlic. Sprinkle them with a bit of olive oil, and just as the recipe says, stick them in a 350 degree oven for about 30 minutes. This is also when I open the window in the kitchen - though it smells pretty good - roasting garlic can be a bit over-powering to sensitive noses! I then can move onto preparing the manicotti.

My filling for manicotti involves a pint of ricotta cheese, 2 cups of mozzarella, a handful of parmesan, an egg, half of a finely chopped red onion, garlic powder, basil, oregano, a bit of parsley, and a few twists from my black pepper mill. No need to add salt, the tomato sauce has plenty of it for the whole meal.

One thing I did not take a picture of, (because really, who wants another boring picture of pasta boiling), are the manicotti noodles. For this particular recipe, I only cook the manicotti noodles about halfway (5 minutes tops). This allows for a sturdier noodle when filling it with cheese, and the time in the oven afterwards is enough to cook the noodles all the way through - plus it's a time saver! Love those!

So - by now the manicotti noodles have been removed from the water and drained and we are ready to start stuffing!!! First things first, I cover the bottom of my 9X13 pan with half of my tomato sauce.

Who says "piping-bags" are just for pastries?!?! NOT ME! Using a big ziplock bag, I fill it with the cheese mixture, cut the corner off and fill my manicotti noodles with ease! Don't make the same mistake I have before by cutting the hole too big - remember the rule (and this is a GREAT rule that can be applied to a lot of different things) you can always take off more but you can never add it back once it's been cut! Anyway - if you cut the hole too big, it ends up taking almost just as long to fill because it gets messy. But if you cut the hole in the corner of the bag slightly smaller, it's really easy to stick it in the noodle - squeeze - and you are filled and ready for the next one! Pretty nifty huh?

I arrange all the noodles in the dish, cover them with the remaining sauce, and top with a bit more parmesan. By this time, the roasted garlic is ready to come out. So I swap the garlic for the manicotti in the oven for about 45 minutes.

I let the garlic sit and cool so it is easy to handle with my bare hands. This is exactly when Ronnie made his way into the kitchen, "mmMMmm - that smells delicious Mama" were his exact words. It really is hard to resist the smell of roasting garlic... too bad for Vampires. So, now that Ronnie likes the smells coming from the kitchen, he is ready and willing to help! We melt a stick of butter in the microwave and once it is done we simply squeeze the bulbs of garlic. The cloves easily plop out of the bulb into the butter and that's pretty nifty too!

Simply following the recipe - our garlic bread topping consists of a stick of melted butter, the 3 bulbs of roasted garlic, a handful of parmesan cheese, and some chopped parsley. We used a fork to mash the garlic cloves and mixed everything together.

A large loaf of french bread is cut into halves and we spread the garlic butter mixture over the two halves. We could already tell at this point that dinner was going to be good!

After washing a few dishes to help Matt out (I'm the cooker (for the most part), he's the dishwasher) the manicotti is ready to come out of the oven. I switch the broiler on and throw (okay - not literally) in the garlic bread.

Almost every time I cook - I learn a little something. Monday night was no exception! Next time I will lower the top rack so my edges don't get burnt by the broiler. It says 5 minutes and I kept a close eye on it and ended up taking it out a little early so I wouldn't totally ruin the bread. Regardless - obviously - it still turned out FANTASTIC!

Serve these up with a salad and you have a GREAT comfort food meal that would be hard not to please everyone! Really easy - a bit time consuming - but well worth it for sure!

I am thinking of switching my picture-provider-uploader-service-whatcha-ma-call-it. Currently I use photobucket - but lately service has been slow and my picture's don't always upload to blogger... Any suggestions? I was thinking of trying picasa?

Till next time! Have fun in the kitchen!!!