Mexican Pasta Shells, Compliments of Karis' Kitchen

I follow quite a great many food bloggers, I like to think. However, I don't often get around to making what they come up with every week, mostly because I'm working on my own ideas, my own meal plans. However, the minute the Karis' Kitchen Blog posted the Vegetarian Taco Stuffed Shells, I copied the link for it into an email doc and sent it off to the husband. He instantly agreed: Next week, we're going to make that.

And make it, we did. Tonight, I got home from work to all the food half-cooked already on the stove. As you can go directly to her for the recipe, I won't repost it here. Essentially, it's bean-stuffed large pasta shells covered in cheese and enchilada sauce and baked in the oven for a half hour. Of course, we made some substitutions to the original recipe. Instead of kidney beans with the black beans and lentils, we used cannelloni beans.

Instead of tomato puree, the husbands opted to purchase tomato paste that meant a more potent flavor for the enchilada sauce. (Note that if you do the same, we cut the paste with water to tame the intensityo of the flavor some).

 

Then, we only baked it for twenty minutes because the cheese was melted already and we were hungry.

(Please ignore the state of the oven.)

Jumping on this recipe was the right move. It was vaguely healthy but with that bar-food flavor that both the husband and I have been really, really wanting lately for no real reason that I can explain. The kid also gives it copious thumbs up. I will say that I agree with Karis that next time, I'd probably turn it into a lasagna. This thought occurred to me as I was desperately trying to cut my shells into bite-size pieces by ramming them against the rounded side of my bowl with a fork. It didn't work well. This is the inherent architectural flaw of the stuffed pasta shell. It exists more for show than for functionality.