Stuffed and Smothered

December 5, 2012

I had a good lunch day. I looked for items that had small portions left. I figured that I would eat up random items that there wasn't enough to serve to my family. There was a small amount of six cheese tortellini in the freezer. I also kept a small container from last night's salad. Voila. Lunch.

I saw that I still had half a box of giant pasta shells. I was going to stuff them and looked for recipes. Almost all of the recipes that I found called for ricotta cheese. I didn't have ricotta. I made up my own stuffing. I browned up some local ground beef. I had a tiny container of leftover sausage from when we made homemade pizza. I dumped that in. I looked for a replacement for the ricotta cheese. I had cream cheese. Perfect. How can you go wrong with cream cheese? I stirred in some of my home-canned spaghetti sauce. After stuffing the shells, I topped them with more sauce and just a little sprinkling of cheddar cheese. I am going grocery shopping tomorrow so that means we need to use up the rest of our bread. I put the kids to work. My daughter spread the butter and my son sprinkled on garlic powder. They were pretty proud of their garlic bread. I sauteed up a jar of our home-canned green beans with some garlic.

Here is the disappointing part of dinner....A cheesey, red meat meal couldn't have been planned at a worse time. I got part of my blood work results back today and my cholesterol is slightly elevated. I know that since starting this challenge, we have really upped our red meat consumption. I guess that I just need to worry more about having a variety for our diet and not worry about spending more at the store. I've just felt that I shouldn't buy too much different meat (chicken & seafood) if I already had a ton of beef at home in the freezer (we stock up locally). It seems like we have also been putting cheese on everything! So delicious but not the best thing for us. While cooking tonight, I tried finding ways to make it slightly healthier. I only used 3/4 of a pack of cream cheese. It was still plenty cheesey. I only put about half of the cheddar cheese on top that I normally would have. Sure there wasn't a nice gooey mess on top (oh how I love those gooey messes) but you could still get the flavor of the cheddar.