Garlic Bread and Stuffed Shells

My freshman year of college, I was very into the “dinners” you could order from every run of the mill pizza place. For about 8 bucks, you could score a huge serving of pasta (at the time baked ziti was my poison of choice), a side salad, and a chunk of garlic bread. Tonight we did the same sort of thing, but classed up because…uh…I cooked it.

There was a day old baguette on the bread cart when we went shopping today, and it was just begging to be made into garlic bread, so it met its fate just like that.


To make: Mix together some soft EB, minced garlic, and oregano. Coat the sliced bread in the EB mixture, and then sprinkle dried basil on top. Bake for ten minutes at 375F or whatever you have the oven set at for the rest of the meal.

For the pasta component, I went with stuffed shells, since I bought the pasta awhile ago, and I’ve been meaning to stuff them FOREVER. I made the cashew ricotta from V’con for the filling, and jazzed it up a bit with some julienned fresh basil.


The red sauce was made up of stewed tomatoes, sherry, dried basil, oregano, garlic salt, and dried chili flakes. YUM. The sauce coated the bottom of a casserole dish, the shells went down over that, and another layer of sauce went on top. This baked at 375F for twenty minutes, sharing the last ten of those (minutes) with the garlic bread. It was almost creepy how much like real ricotta this tasted…or maybe I’m just getting used to it, now that I’ve made it a couple times and haven’t had actual ricotta in awhile.

The salad didn’t get a picture, but it was pretty standard as salads go…I’m sure you can imagine it.

Selah.