Spinach and Cheese Stuffed Manicotti 

ADVERTISEMENT

Spinach and Cheese Stuffed Manicotti

Manicotti is a dish of great comfort. It makes plenty, it’s filling, it’s completely family-friendly, and the leftovers are even better than the freshly made batch. We make this when we have a handful of friends or family around. It’s a nice, no-fuss recipe that everyone seems to love. Make it ahead, keep it in the fridge and toss it in the oven when everybody is ready to eat.

If you didn’t know, manicotti is a pasta noodle shaped like a tube. It’s about 4-inches long, and 1-inch in diameter. Usually it’s boiled until al dente, then cooled, filled with some kind of cheese filling, covered with sauce and baked.  In this recipe, you don’t have to bake the noodles before filling them.  They’ll cook in the sauce when you bake the manicotti in the oven.

🛒Ingredients needed:

• ricotta cheese
• mozzarella cheese
• cream cheese
• parmesan cheese
• frozen spinach
• eggs
• salt & freshly ground black pepper
• manicotti noodles
• marinara sauce

✏️How to make Spinach and Cheese Stuffed Manicotti:

*The complete, printable recipe with all ingredients and instructions is at the end of this post.

The filling is very simple to make. Just mix it all up in a bowl until it’s well-blended. If you (or your kids) don’t like spinach, you can always leave it out… though I’ve found that you don’t really detect it all that much with all of the other wonderful things and sauce in the recipe.

You might consider it a good way to “sneak” some good stuff into dinner.

A layer of sauce goes into the bottom of a 13×9-inch pan.

The easiest way to stuff manicotti shells is the put the mixed filling into a plastic bag. You can use either a frosting piping bag or a gallon zip bag. Snip the corner, gather the top and squeeze the filling into the corner.

Hold an uncooked manicotti shell in your hand and squeeze the filling inside the shell. Let it overflow on both sides.

Place the filled shell into the sauce-lined pan.

Repeat with remaining manicotti and fill the pan with the stuffed shells, until you run out of shells and filling.

Cover with a generous layer of marinara sauce.

Sprinkle cheese on top. At this point, you can cover with foil, refrigerate and then bake when you’re ready. It’s ok to leave it in the refrigerator overnight.

Cover and bake for about an hour.

Pop open a bottle of red wine and eat! This Spinach and Cheese Stuffed Manicotti recipe will feed 6 or 7 hungry people- 2 stuffed shells each is plenty when served with salad and garlic bread.  And lighter eaters will be plenty full with just one shell.

★How to Store: