Laura Banford: Easy International Cooking, where I'll show you how to go around the world without ever leaving your kitchen.
Today's destination is Italy. Our recipe, Stuffed Shells, is a rustic Italian dish that's cheesy, delicious, and vegetarian. The ingredients that you'll need for stuffed shells are: one pound of cooked pasta shells, one cup of frozen thawed spinach, two eggs, two cups of ricotta, one-third cup parmesan cheese, one cup diced tomatoes, one-and-a-half cup shredded mozzarella, two cups of milk, two tablespoons of flour, two tablespoons of butter, oregano and nutmeg. The pieces of equipments that you'll need are: a large skillet, a pair of tongs, a couple of sharp knives, a wisk, and a baking dish.
Now we're going to make the filling for our stuffed shells. It's a spinach and ricotta filling. I have about a couple of frozen thawed spinach that squeezed water out of, I'm going to add whole milk ricotta, just two cups, rich and creamy. I need couple of eggs that makes the mixture little fluffy, only once, couple of tablespoons of parmesan. I need some nutmeg and some oregano, I love oregano, it's great in a rustic Italian dish, salt and pepper, mix this up.
We're going to make a tomato-studded bechamel sauce to go on top of our stuffed shells. Shells are already stuffed. I melted a couple of tablespoons of butter in this pan. We're going to add some shallots, diced shallots, a little bit of garlic. We're creating a roux with butter and flour, but first we're going to season it with the garlic and shallots.
Butter starting to froth, add two tablespoons of flour. Stir that around so that the flour cooks, the rawness of the flour cooks, creating a paste, that our roux, getting a wisk in there. Now you see that the flour is turning a golden brown, that's the color we want. It's time to add two cups of whole milk and I'm going to whip to incorporate the flour into the milk and let that simmer, bring it up to temperature.
This is a bechamel sauce. Now this is thickening up. Now I'm going to create -- actually let's season it, salt, oregano, pepper, nice, crushed black pepper. I'm going to add shredded mozzarella, this is going to be nice and cheesy, about half a cup, stir that around, and creates a cheese sauce, incorporate that, and then finally I'm going to add some tomatoes. These are canned diced tomatoes, perfect for this, not a lot, and not a tomato sauce but diced tomatoes, there is our tomato-studded bechamel sauce.
Our stuffed shells are ready. Wow! That looks cheesy and delicious, set it here, and some nice red wine, put some pieces of fresh oregano on top. That is a really wonderful rustic Italian dish. It's reminiscent of being in a farmhouse in Tuscany.
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