What's for supper? Creamy Ziti with spinach and ham

Tonight's dinner menu:

Creamy Ziti, from Saving Dinner. We even have the frozen spinach and ham she calls for. Serendipity.

What's for supper on guitar and choir night? Skillet Goulash (from $5 Dinners)

Skillet Goulash with Spinach, from The $5 Dinner Mom One-Dish Dinners Cookbook, by Erin Chase.  Includes ground beef and pasta; I'll cook the meat separately and add it at the end after taking out a vegetarian part.

Carrot sticks and ??

Chocolate chip oatmeal muffins.

What's for supper?

Tonight's non-repeatable dinner menu:

Casserole made of leftover brown rice, smoked sausage, a cupful of beef broth, and a bit of pork stir fry that The Apprentice made on Wednesday

Hot spinach dip: thawed frozen spinach, seasoned and heated in a skillet, with a cupful of cream cheese heating in the middle

Carrot sticks, mini pretzels, fresh crusty bread (from the Euro store where Mr. Fixit got the sausage)

Choice of Polish doughnuts (also from the Euro store) or strawberry crisp with yogurt.  The crisp wasn't very crispy when it came out of the oven, so I sprinkled on the end of a box of flaky-crunch cereal that The Apprentice brought home from university.

And that's why this menu is pretty much non-repeatable.

What's for supper? Back to our veggie roots

When we were first married, we had more vegetarian meals than meat ones; especially quick things we could make after work. Green Spaghetti and Chickpea Patties were two of our standbys. We found the Chickpea Patties recipe in a 1991 Vegetarian Times article; there's a recipe for Green Spaghetti in the same article, but we make ours differently--more cheese.

So that's what we had tonight:

Green Pasta (we used fusilli)
Chickpea Patties
Carrot sticks.

Green Pasta

I measured out the ingredients tonight as I went, so that I could write it down; but the amounts are really variable. I happened to have a whole block of cream cheese (bought on sale), but it's not necessary to use quite that much. We had enough leftovers to fill a casserole dish.

1 8-oz. block cream cheese
1/3 cup cottage cheese
1/3 cup Parmesan cheese
5 oz. mozzarella, cut up
1 tbsp. margarine (probably not necessary with all that cream cheese)
1/4 tsp. or more black pepper (or grind some on at the table)
bit of garlic powder
leftover cooked broccoli (entirely optional)
1 6-oz. package fresh spinach (but frozen would work too)
Approximately 1 lb. hot pasta

What you want to do is have hot drained pasta, hot just-cooked spinach, and the blended mixture of cheeses all ready to mix at the same time. You don't have to cook the finished mixture; the heat of the pasta and spinach warms up the sauce ingredients.

I started the pasta cooking, had the spinach rinsed, and then put everything else into the food processor and got it pretty much blended. When the pasta was done, I let it drain in a colander and cooked the spinach in the same pot for a few minutes, steaming in its own rinse water. When it was wilted, I ran it through the food processor with the rest of the sauce mixture. Then, in a BIG bowl (or you could use the pasta/spinach pot again), I mixed everything together. If you think you might have cooked too much pasta, mix it into the sauce mixture gradually until you have the proportions you want. Serve as soon as possible.

Linked from 4 Moms Share Vegetarian Recipes.

A frozen spinach...thing

Is this a hot dip? A side dish? We're not sure, but it was quite tasty.

Hot Spinach with Cream Cheese

1 10-ounce package frozen spinach, partially thawed if possible
One third to half a brick of cream cheese
Butter or margarine, a couple of spoonfuls or whatever you like
Some kind of crumbs--I used whole wheat soda crackers, about a cupful
Dash of nutmeg and any other seasonings you like
Milk as needed

This is what I did: In a small covered casserole I put the spinach, all by itself, and let it warm up in the oven while I was baking something else. If the spinach is already thawed, you can probably skip that step. I took it out about fifteen minutes later, mashed the spinach around, and added the cream cheese, cut in pieces--not beaten in, just added here and there. I topped it with the crumbs, butter and nutmeg, and let it heat until the cheese was getting melty and the crumbs were toasted. At that point it also seemed to be getting dry around the edges, so I added enough milk to keep it soft (burned spinach is not nice). We ate this as a side dish along with pineapple chicken-balls and orzo: not that I'm particularly recommending that flavour combination, but it suited what we had in the cupboard and the freezer. The Apprentice in particular thought it was good enough to ask for a repeat sometime.