Haunting the Frozen Aisle: Spinach, Artichokes, Tortellini

Wait a minute … how did I go from celebrating local, seasonal produce to featuring the frozen food aisle?

Last week was 3 weeks since the last winter market, and if anyone’s forgotten, it’s still February. Despite two days of spring-like weather (70 degrees and sunny on Friday … I even broke out my flip-flops!), the only things blooming around here are mud and stinkbugs. Those nasty insects are all over the place, infiltrating the kids’ bedrooms and crawling about the kitchen floor.  

But I digress. In the absence of local veggies, I headed for the frozen section of the supermarket and came up with some decent results. (All hail frozen spinach!) I bought a few things in the produce department too – plum tomatoes and zucchini.

The good news is that despite a shortage of local produce, the week was super cheap (just over $90 for everything – my best week ever) and super tasty, thanks to not just the spinach but my other main ingredients:  ricotta cheese and ground beef.

The meals are also pretty comforting – something I needed to get out of my lazy blue mood and back into a happy-go-foodie state of mind.

For those of you die-hard locavores, check back next week for a fully southeastern-PA menu. Friday was the monthly Kennett Square Winter Market, and Dave came home bearing sacks of veggies:  kale, microgreens, fresh spinach, and acorn squash. Now I just have start finding recipes for all of it 

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The past week’s main events:

Tortellini Soup. This is one of those hearty soups that require only crusty bread and a sprinkling of Parmesan cheese to make a complete, satisfying meal. The soup takes just 30 minutes, start to finish, chopping time included.  I wrote down the recipe years ago and don’t have the original source; I’ve also modified things, so I figure it’s okay to post:

Ingredients:

 2 Tbsp olive oil

1 small to medium red onion, chopped

2 medium carrots, peeled and chopped

2 ribs celery, chopped

1 small zucchini, chopped

2 plum tomatoes, chopped

3 cloves minced garlic

4 cups (32 oz.) chicken broth

½ cup water

1 15 oz can red kidney beans, rinsed and drained

          2 Tbsp Worchestershire sauce

1 9 oz package tortellini

(we like portobello mushroom or Italian sausage tortellini for the soup. We’ve found that plain cheese tortellini don’t provide enough flavor for our taste, but this of course is up to you.)

                Freshly grated Parmesan cheese

                Salt and pepper

               

Instructions:

1.)    Heat olive oil in large pot over. Add vegetables, tomatoes, and garlic. Cook and stir 5 min. or until veggies are crisp-tender.

2.)    Add broth, water, beans, and Worchestershire sauce. Heat to boiling. Add tortellini.

3.)    Cook 5 minutes, stirring occasionally, or until tortellini are tender.

4.)    Season to taste with salt and pepper.

5.)    Serve topped with Parmesan.

 

Dip Night. I’d never thought about serving veggie dips for the main course at dinner, but we had a lot of tortilla chips left over from my sister-in-law’s baby shower. Needless to say, the pantry won out over my snobbish requirements for a proper dinner.

I wanted to stay light on the cheese and heavy on the veggies, and these two didn’t disappoint. We added a green salad, and dinner was complete.

Creamy Zucchini and Ricotta Spread. From Martha Stewart’s Everyday Food, this dip is at its best with lime tortilla chips. It has a really fresh, clean taste, and it’s going to be my go-to recipe to use up zucchini this summer.   

 

 

 

 

Lighter Spinach-Artichoke Dip. I’ve modified this from an online version that turned out overly cheesy and relatively flat in the taste department. We served the new and improved dip at the baby shower, and it was a big hit.

Ingredients:

 1 Tbsp olive oil

1 onion, chopped

4 cloves garlic, minced

10 oz frozen chopped spinach – thawed

10 oz frozen artichoke hearts – thawed

8 oz reduced fat cream cheese, at room temperature.

¼ cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese (or a combination of Parmesan, Romano, Asiago, etc)

Red pepper flakes (optional)

Salt and pepper

 

Directions:

1.)    Heat oil in large pot or skillet. Add garlic and onions; sauté until soft but not browned.

2.)    Add spinach and artichokes to pot. Mix well; season with salt and pepper. Heat through.

3.)    With pot on low heat, add cream cheese and stir until well combined.

4.)    Remove from heat. Add Parmesan and red pepper flakes if using.

5.)    Season to taste with more salt and pepper as necessary.

6.)    Serve warm with blue corn tortilla chips or chunks of bread.

 

New Joe’s Special. This is a strange (to my East Coast sensibilities; apparently this is a pretty familiar dish in the San Francisco Bay area) but satisfying dish from Mark Bittman’s The Food Matters Cookbook. Basically it’s a ground beef hash with spinach, mushrooms, egg, and Parmesan cheese; you can serve it over any grain you like (we used whole wheat noodles since we had some languishing in the pantry.) While I can’t post the exact recipe here, it goes something like this:

Saute onion, garlic, and half a pound of ground beef; add 2 lbs of spinach (I used frozen), oregano, nutmeg, and sautéed mushrooms. Then crack in an egg, stir, and finally add a generous handful of Parmesan cheese.

When you make New Joe’s Special, you can cut double the onion, garlic, and ground beef. Then set aside half of the beef mixture and use it within 2 days to make the Crock-Pot Spinach Lasagna (see below). It’ll make you love the lasagna even more for how quickly it goes together.

 

Slow Cooker Spinach Lasagna. Modified from “Mile High Spinach Lasagna” featured Feb 2, 2011 in The Buffalo News.

I never considered lasagna in a slow cooker, but it’s ingenious – partially because you can make it in advance, partially because you don’t have to turn on the oven. And since I love lasagna year-round, now I have a way to make it during the summer without turning the kitchen into a sauna.

For my vegetarian friends, leave out the ground beef. Add the spinach to the onion and garlic in step #1; then combine the spinach mixture with the cheese, milk, and seasonings in step#2.  Follow the recipe from there.

Ingredients:

1 Tbsp olive oil

1 medium onion, chopped

3 cloves garlic, minced

½ lb ground beef

1 10oz package frozen chopped spinach, thawed and squeezed dry

1 15oz container part-skim ricotta cheese

1 Tbsp Italian seasoning

1/3 cup 1% milk

¼  cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese (or a combination of Parmesan, Romano, Asiago, etc.)

2 cups shredded mozzarella OR 2 cups Parmesan/Romano/Asiago mix

1 8 oz can no-salt-added tomato sauce

1 box no-boil lasagna noodles

1 jar red spaghetti sauce (I used Newman’s Own Sockarooni)

Salt and pepper

 Instructions:

1.)    Heat oil in skillet. Add onion and garlic. Saute 3 min.  Add ground beef. Cook until all meat is browned, about 5 min. Drain off excess fat and set meat mixture aside.

2.)     In a large bowl, mix spinach, ricotta, Italian seasoning, milk, and ¼ cup Parmesan cheese. Set aside.

3.)    With cooking spray, coat the bottom and sides of your slow cooker.

4.)    Pour tomato sauce into the cooker and spread evenly over the bottom.

5.)    Top sauce with some noodles, breaking them up as necessary to cover as much of the bottom of the slow cooker as possible.

6.)    Spoon ½ cup pasta sauce over noodles.

7.)    Sprinkle with 1/3 of meat mixture.

8.)    Cover meat mixture with 1/3 of ricotta mixture.

9.)    Sprinkle ½ cup mozzarella or Parmesan.

10.) Repeat steps 5-9 twice more.

11.) For the final layer, cover with remaining noodles, pasta sauce, and mozzarella/Parmesan.

12.) Cover and cook. On high setting: 1 ½ hrs; on low setting, 2 ½ hours.

13.) Turn off slow cooker. Don’t be alarmed by small pools of water on top of the lasagna. Let lasagna stand 15 minutes to absorb the moisture. (It goes away, and the moisture is needed for those no-boil noodles.)

14.)  Serve and enjoy.