Happy Halloween

After two days of secretive planning and preparations it was time for our annual Halloween party tonight and when it comes to gross foods I aim to please *grin*. 

I've been trolling the internet looking for new creepy foods to make and this year's menu consisted of brains, cockroaches, turds, a rotten cheese log (blue cheese & cream cheese with a touch of green food coloring)....

 

monster mouths which are just chocolate chip cookies cut in half with a little bit of red icing, marshmallows and almond slivers for fangs....

and swamp water which is a favorite of ours and is an orange juice spritzer with a touch of grenadine to darken up the color with black sanding sugar and twizzlers as garnish :)

 I found this pumpkin dip on pinterest and it is to die for!! Oh my goodness is this good :)

 

Of course every Halloween party has to have at least one food item that is totally over the top disgusting and this year my pièce de résistance was a worm dessert that I named the 'Nightcrawler Parfait' *grin*.

 You wouldn't believe how life like these things were! You make them in straws with the accordion necks so they get that ribbed center just like a real worm and they were cold and rubbery like they were actually alive. If you looped them around in the dish they actually moved and untwisted. Eek.

I made all of the children close their eyes when I brought the dishes of them to the table and then when they opened their eyes you should have seen the look they each had as I proceeded to tell them that they were fresh from the compost bin LOL.

 Not one of them would eat them!!

It was absolutely hilarious to see them turn a little green as they poked around at them in their bowls. My dad who loves a good joke grabbed a handful of the worms and stuffed them in his mouth so they were hanging out with some of the cookie crumble dirt hanging from them while the children looked at him in disbelief  :) In the end they all picked them off of the pudding beneath except for my oldest son who managed to eat some of his but it wasn't an easy task *grin*.

You know it was a great Halloween party when you make something that no one wants to eat!

Hope you all had a wonderful Halloween :)

Hugs,

Rosina

Fall Comfort Food ~ Sweet Potato Gnocchi

 October 1st was the first time I had to light the woodstoves to take the chill off of the air in our home and we awoke to our first hard frost of the season yesterday! The lawn was crispy and white and all of the water buckets for the cows and chickens had a layer of ice locking in the fresh water below. All of this cold weather has definitely left me yearning for warm comfort foods :)

I've been building up a little recipe cache on Pinterest which is where I found a yummy recipe for sweet potato gnocchi but I didn't have all of the ingredients on hand so I took a chance and remixed the recipe a bit and it turned out delicious!

 In place of the ricotta cheese I used one egg, subbed in 1/2 a cup of asiago cheese instead of the parmesan, reduced the salt to 1 tsp. of sea salt in the dough instead of the two she called for and I baked my sweet potatoes in the oven for about 45 minutes at 400 degrees fahrenheit instead of microwaving them.

Now this was my very first time making gnocchi so I had no idea how sticky the dough would be but I found that I needed to use at least 4 cups of flour to get my dough to be workable and not crazy sticky but the original recipe only called for 2 3/4 cups. So I'm thinking my sweet potatoes were much larger than hers but you'll definitely know if you need to add more flour *grin*. 

 With my dough all ready to go I got busy rolling out dough snakes, chopping them into little bite sized pieces with my pastry cutter and then rolling them around with the tines of a fork to give them the little indentations in the photo. Nobody told me how many little gnocchi this recipe made though!!

I kept cutting and rolling and cutting and rolling...

until I had two giant cookie sheets full of them plus more all over the counter. On my final count I had over 200 of them so they all went into the freezer except for the ones I kept out for dinner and we're all stocked up for a good while now I think :)

The kids aren't real big on the taste of sage so I omitted the sage butter that went along with the recipe as well and instead made an easy sauce with basil and homemade chicken stock. 

I used:

1 cup homemade chicken stock

1 tbsp dried basil

1 tbsp arrowroot powder

1 tbsp onion powder

salt & pepper to taste

Mix all of the above together in the cold chicken stock and pour over two carrots cut into matchsticks, two cups of broccoli florets and 3 cloves of pressed garlic that have been sauteed until just tender. The arrowroot created a nice thick sauce just perfect for our fresh gnocchi to be coated in. Mmm, mmm good. Now if only there were leftovers *grin*.

Hugs,

Rosina

Sunshine & Sausage Making

Now that is an odd title I do admit but since my photos include a little bit of both I thought it fit *grin*.

The sun graced us today with its warmth and light and it felt so good after the last bout of rain we were soaked with. After lunch we bundled up and set out for a walk to burn off some extra energy from being house bound and searched for interesting finds along the way. We admired the snow still clinging to the highest mountain peaks, spied on little Sparrows and Spotted Towhees and at one point my 5 year old even ripped his boots off so that he could walk barefoot over a bunch of clumped moss along the roadside LOL. Now that would have made a good photo. Oh how I wish I had brought my camera with me!!

We have finally finished putting our cow into the freezer which is such a relief. It was two very long days of cutting and wrapping from morning till night and tired aching feet and backs but the sight of our freezer bursting to the top with those brown paper packages makes it all worth it.

Our favorite part of the whole process though is making sausage :)
I use a mix of 3/4 beef to 1/4 pork, fresh garlic and onions run through the grinder along with the meat and a bunch of spices mixed in to make our sausage meat. I don't add any extra fat or fillers, just the basics and then once its all mixed together Hubby feeds it into our grinder which has a handy little sausage stuffing attachment and I control the sausage casings, filling them uniformly for twisting into links later.

The whole process moves along quite quickly and if you ever need to buy a very economical meat grinder with a lot of punch I highly recommend Moulinex. We have a Moulinex HV6 and it has two plates for course and fine grinding, sausage horn and a reverse function in the even that it jams and we have been using it for the last 9 years. It has ground all our beef that has been butchered since purchasing it and we finally had to sharpen the blade this time around as it was a bit dull. I'm not sure if you can still get the HV6 but I see there is a newer model now available :)

So here they are all twisted into links and portioned into dinner sized amounts. They are drier than a normal store bought sausage understandably since we don't add any additional fat but they make up for it in taste and I know exactly what is in them :)

Hugs,
Rosina

Apple Nachos... How have we not met before?!

How is it that I had never heard of apple nachos?!

I was reading one of my new favorite blogs, Manifest Vegan, when I came across a very interesting recipe for a fruity nacho. Hence the apple nacho name.

Apparently this recipe has been around for quite a while and I seriously must be one of the last few people in the blogosphere to hear about it! Basically it's just thin slices of apple, and then I drizzled on a wee bit of organic peanut butter, unsweetened coconut, almond slivers, walnuts and a few chipits for fun :)

In the original recipe I linked to above she uses pecans which would be awesome to and what about a few dried cranberries on there instead of the chipits? I am SO doing that next time!!

What a great snack it made for the children this afternoon when their tummies were growling and it was way to early for supper :) It's pretty healthy right? I guess maybe the chipits aren't LOL.

Okay now be honest... if you have never heard of apple nachos you have to let me know that I'm not the only one that missed out on this fun food idea *grin*.

Hugs,
Rosina

Around the Farm

Thank you everyone for all of the lovely birthday wishes that you sent my way earlier this week :)

We still don't have a drop of snow even though it has tried the last couple of days with the constant grey and drizzle but it looks like we just might be in for a green Christmas! Not that I mind terribly as it makes winter driving much nicer but I know the children are longing for it and just itching to try out their new snow gloves that we just bought. We've got all the appropriate gear now and nowhere to wear it *grin*.

Despite the wet weather we have ventured outdoors to say hello to our baby. Well actually he's really not a baby anymore but he likes to think he is especially with all the ruckus he makes if we don't pay enough attention to him when we're nearby :)

The children collected a good pile of cedar boughs, laurel bush and this lovely cotoneaster for our mantle and it looks and smells so festive in our family room now with it above the fireplace. I've tried numerous times to get a good photo to share with you but it has been so dark and grey that my photos just look terrible so hopefully the sun shows up soon so I can get a good shot *grin*.

We ventured up the mountain behind my mom's house to the look out...

and even spotted a few mushrooms that are still thriving beneath the cedar trees.

I've had a little sack of Kamut grains in the cupboard that my mom had given to me and they have just been waiting to be used in the perfect recipe and yesterday I finally found one! Tasha at Clean Eating Mama shared the most delicious recipe for little Kamut/walnut thumbprint cookies and oh my word they are SO good *grin*. Luckily I had all of the ingredients on hand and we whipped up a double batch so we would have plenty to share on Christmas eve :)

My nutrimill made a beautiful fine flour from the Kamut and it truly is a caramel color when it comes out like she notes in her recipe and such a wonderful flavor. Now I'm going to have to see what else I can make with it! If you have a tried and true Kamut recipe or one you've been eyeing up I'd love to know about it :)

Hugs,
Rosina

Fall Leaf Sugar Cookies

We are spending a lot of our days embracing the beauty of fall around here lately as we watch the leaves on the trees transition to their vibrant autumn colors and we happily jump on their crunchy counterparts that litter the lanes :) The children keep bringing in handfuls of stray leaves to that they just couldn't resist because they were 'to pretty' and I keep picking up crumbled bits off of the tile floor beneath our nature table as they fall apart from all of the handling *grin*.

So when I saw a photo of some great fall leaf cookies on the Country Living website I just had to bake some with the kids. The only problem was there was no recipe so I made a batch of my favorite sugar cookie dough that I use all the time and thought I'd share it with you to. It makes a nice sized batch of dough for tons of fun :)

4 eggs
2 cup sugar
2 cup unsalted butter

Cream the butter and sugar together. Add one egg at a time and beat really well until the butter mixture is super light and fluffy.

1 tsp. baking powder
5 cups all purpose flour

Add the flour and baking powder to the butter mixture and mix just until combined. Once you've got it all combined divide your dough into four chunks. Don't worry about being completely accurate, just eyeball it up.

Now color each of your dough balls a different fall color :) I really like to use Wilton Gel colors. They create gorgeous vibrant colors and they are cleaner to work with than the old drip style liquid food coloring. You can find them at most grocery stores and walmart.

After you have finished adding your food coloring, wrap each piece in a bit of saran wrap and place in the fridge for about 20 minutes so that dough firms up and makes it easy for rolling later :) Roll out your dough on a floured counter top and bake in a pre-heated oven at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for 10 - 12 minutes or until just starting to brown and firm up around the edges and the centers are slightly puffed up.

I set the kitchen up with three work stations so that each of the children had their own rolling pin, cookie cutters and assortment of colors and they had fun ripping off chunks of color and creating their own fall color palette :)

It actually turned into a color blending lesson on top of the baking fun as we watched the colors meld together creating new tones of oranges and greens and the surprise arrival of brown each time we balled up our dough scraps and rolled them out again. Things got quite psychedelic LOL.

So much yummy fall fun. I can see we're going to have a lot of tea parties in the coming days *grin*.

Hugs,
Rosina

Celebrating Michaelmas

On thursday we celebrated our very first Michaelmas :)
I had found a great pattern and had been secretly cutting and stitching together a little wool dragon each night after the kids were in bed that would be perfect for our little playmobil Sir George to battle. I finished it up just in time and set it up on our nature table for them to find in the morning when they awoke.

Of course they beat me out of bed and I could hear them gathering excitedly around the Michaelmas scene when they got up and then the quiet that followed as they discovered the little coloring pages of a knight fighting a dragon that I had left on their tables for them to color. It was perfect. I had a few minutes to catch up on what I had to do to get the day started and they had fun picking their favorite colors for their dragons :)

After lunch we took some time to read a little story about Sir George and the Dragon. There seem to be a lot of different versions of Michaelmas stories from St. Michael hurling the dragon (lucifer) from heaven to Sir George slaying the dragon and our gentler version that I decided to go with of a dragon that had the hiccups and the gnomes that called on Sir George to help them solve their problem of a pesky fire breathing dragon. You can find a few different versions here:

The Most Beautiful Dragon
A Little Flower Garden's Michaelmas Festival
Our Little Nature Nests Michaelmas Story
In the end our dragon became the bread maker and I thought it was a perfect fit for my 5 year old :) It came from a copy of Before the Journey that I purchased last year.

With our story fresh in our minds and the anticipation of a fire breathing bread maker we went into the kitchen to make some green bread dough together to shape our dragon out of :)

They added gnarly toenails with pumpkin seeds...

poked in spines made of almonds and we cut in scales with a knife that puffed up and gave him a great lumpy body. Oh boy did he taste good with dinner, although there is something very odd about eating green bread. It just feels weird *grin*.

I can't wait until next year so that we can do it again and maybe add in some more fun ideas that I've seen around the web. One great post with lots of links is over at Rockin' Granola but if you google Michaelmas you will find tons of inspiration!

In case you would like to try my bread recipe I thought I would share it with you. It makes awesome soft white buns if you want a non green or dragonish version for another day LOL.

1/2 cup water
1/2 cup milk
1/2 cup unsalted butter
1 egg
a dribble of maple syrup
2 1/2 tsp. yeast
3 1/2 cups unbleached flour
green food coloring optional

Heat your milk and water until it is nice and warm, pour it into your mixing bowl along with your maple syrup, sprinkle your yeast over the water/milk and allow it to proof for about 10 minutes until nice and bubbly. Add your melted butter, egg, and 1 cup of flour and mix. I like to do this to break up my egg nicely before adding the rest of the flour. Now add in your remaining 2 1/2 cups of flour and mix until it forms a ball that you can turn out onto your counter to knead. Knead for about 5-8 minutes until nice and soft and smooth. Cover and allow it to rest until doubled in size. Punch down your dough after it rises and you can now shape it into your dragon, rolls or whatever you would like to use it for :)
Bake at 425 Fahrenheit for 15-20 minutes or until nice and golden and sounds hollow when you tap on it.

If you celebrated Michaelmas and shared photos or stories on your blog I would love to stop by and see how you made your day special :)

Hugs,
Rosina

Homemade Rhubarb Juice ~ Recipe

We are still swimming in rhubarb around here as our plants just keep giving and giving :) So I thought that I would share again with you my favorite way to make a rhubarb juice which is such a wonderful summertime treat :)

The kids and I filled an entire laundry basket heaping to the top with fresh rhubarb stalks to bring into the house for stewing and of course once it is cut it's best to use it up right away so I got busy washing them up and trimming off any dirty spots.

This is so super easy to make and even if you only have a little bit of rhubarb you probably have enough to make at least one special batch :)

Cut up 6 cups of fresh rhubarb stalks into 1 - 2 inch pieces and place in a heavy bottomed sauce pot. Add 8 cups of water, 2 1/2 cups of sugar and 2 or 3 nice thick slices of lemon and bring to a boil. Once boiling reduce the heat, cover and simmer for about 15 minutes when the rhubarb has completely gone mushy.

Let the syrup cool and then strain it through a fine mesh sieve into a jar. You will have a gorgeous pink liquid and you can eat the boiled rhubarb to! The stewed rhubarb is so sweet and tasty that the children love to eat it warm straight from the sieve :) Usually there isn't a stitch of mushy rhubarb left when we're done but since I made so much this year I shared it with the dog and the cow *grin*.

I got some great new jars this spring to that I couldn't wait to use and this seemed to be the perfect time. They have rubber stoppers that you clamp down tightly and we've filled them quite a few times with rhubarb syrup to take along camping with us or for a picnic by the pond.

The rest of the juice I canned in my mason canning jars and some of it I froze as well. If you want to can the rhubarb juice all you need to do is wash up some of your larger canning jars and pour the boiling hot juice straight from the pot after you've strained it into your jars and then screw on your lids with your canning seals heated up just like if you were making jam :) So far I have about a dozen quart jars to last us through the winter and 7 wine bottles full in the freezer. It's going to be so much fun to be able to pull them out in the dead of winter and enjoy a little bit of spring :)

To finish off your yummy rhubarb juice you can mix 1 part syrup with two parts water or for a fizzy spritzer you can use a sparkling water like Pellagrino instead plain water for a real treat. Personally that's my favorite way to drink it and it is so refreshing on a hot day.

Have fun making some of your own!

Hugs,
Rosina


PS. Looking for more yummy recipes?? Check out this week's Hearth and Soul blog hop :)

Mouthwatering Rhubarb Pie ~ Recipe

Rhubarb season is in full swing and there is no shortage of it around here! We've been eating it in muffins, cakes and now pie :) The tartness of the rhubarb mixed with a good dose of sugar makes for a mouth watering combination. If you're not crazy about a sweet pie then a warm slice of rhubarb pie might change your mind. The tart bite of the rhubarb counteracts the sweet and melds together perfectly.

Pull out your food processor and start feeding in fresh stalks from your rhubarb plant. The amount of sliced rhubarb you need will depend on the size of your pie plate so pull out an empty pie plate and start filling it with your sliced rhubarb until you have a really heaping dish full. It will shrink as it cooks so more is better than not enough!

I have quite a deep pie plate so I used about 10 cups of sliced rhubarb while my mom can only squeeze about 8 cups into hers so using your pie plate will give you the perfect amount :)

Once you have all of your rhubarb sliced and measured out put it into a large bowl and add:

1 1/2 cups sugar
6 heaping Tbsp. minute tapioca
1 tsp. nutmeg
1 egg lightly beaten

and mix all of it thoroughly together. If you are worried that it's to much sugar, don't. You could cut it back a bit but I wouldn't take away to much. You need that sweet to keep you from puckering up to much when you take that first bite *grin*.

I know that lots of people use flour as a thickener in their pies to help all of those juices set but I really like to use tapioca because you don't have to worry about getting any lumps. It's just that easy!

Now that you have your rhubarb all mixed up, pour it into your pie plate that is lined with an unbaked pastry shell for the bottom of your pie.

Tuck a few dabs of unsalted butter on top of your rhubarb filling and cover with another sheet of your pastry. Pinch, roll, or tuck the ends of your pastry tightly together to help seal in all of that rhubarb goodness and to finish it off you can sprinkle a little bit of sugar over the top of your pastry. I also like to take a sharp knife and cut in a few slits across the center of my pastry to let steam escape as it cooks.

Place in a pre-heated oven at 400 degrees fahrenheit for the first 15 minutes and then turn your oven down to 350 degrees fahrenheit after that and continue cooking for another hour.

Mmm, mmm!

You will know your pie is good and ready to come out of the oven when your pastry has browned up, you can hear it bubbling and some of the juices are starting to escape :)

It's always a good idea to put a sheet of foil or parchment paper underneath your pie as it cooks because more often than not there will be a little bit of delicious sweetness that escapes and drips out of your pie. This makes clean up a cinch!

If you can keep yourself from cutting into your rhubarb pie while it's hot it will set up beautifully and the pieces will come out nice and solid. Of course we couldn't help but dip into our pie while it was still hot so we made a bit of a mess of ours but it was so worth it *grin*.

Enjoy!
Rosina

PS. Looking for more yummy recipes?? Check out this week's Hearth and Soul blog hop

Fabulous Vegetable Fritters ~ Recipe

I have been dying to try making some vegetable fritters after running across a recipe for zucchini ones. I LOVE zucchini but why stop at that? I had to throw in peppers, carrots, herbs, and why you could even use beets. I hadn't thought of that! Now I know what I'm going to put in next time *grin*.

So much fresh goodness with a little bit of heat from the garlic and chili sauce.... mmm, they are so good that it left all of us wanting more :)

You will need:

1 medium sized zucchini grated (about 1 pound)
1/2 a red pepper diced
2 large carrots grated
3 scallions finely sliced
A big handful of fresh parsley chopped
2 cloves of garlic crushed
6 heaping Tbsp all purpose flour
1-2 tsp. hot garlic chili sauce
2 eggs
1 cup grated parmigiano reggiano
Sea salt and pepper to taste

Start by slicing, dicing, and grating all of your vegetables. Any method of grating will do. I actually used my food processor for the zucchini since the larger shreds of zucchini it produces will cook quickly in the hot pan, while I hand grated the carrot to get it nice and fine as I knew the carrot would take longer to cook them than the zucchini and I thought this might even out the cooking times. It worked out well :)

For the rest of the vegetables I sliced and diced everything rather fine just to keep it all nice and compact without to many really large and chunky pieces. My mom has a huge patch of parsley growing in her greenhouse so I picked myself a really big bouquet of it to use. I'm guessing that by the time I was done chopping it up it was close to half a cup but you could definitely use less if you don't have that much fresh on hand.

Did you know that fresh parsley keeps really well in a vase of water? It does! I like to keep a big bouquet of it on the kitchen windowsill and just cut off chunks as I need it. Just keep topping up the water supply each day and it can last there for a good couple of weeks :)

So with all of your vegetables ready, in a large bowl mix in the garlic, egg, chili sauce, flour, a couple good grinds of your sea salt and pepper...

and finally mix in your parmigiano reggiano. I love this cheese! Its salty taste and firm texture are perfect for this recipe as it doesn't melt down into a sloppy gooey mess when it heats up like some of the softer cheeses. Feta would also be a good substitution if you don't have any of the parmigiano reggiano.

Now that all of your ingredients are mixed together you will notice that it starts to weep a bit and some of the juices from the zucchini and peppers come out. Don't worry! Let the whole mixture rest for about 20 minutes and the liquid will settle to the bottom of the bowl. You can use the waiting time to clean up some of the dishes and heat up a large stainless steel frying pan over medium heat with enough olive oil or butter to thoroughly grease the pan but not to much that your fritters end up swimming in it :)

Once your pan is nice and hot drop heaping tablespoons of your fritter mix in and flatten them down slightly. I like to use two tablespoons to do this. One to scoop and the other to push it off the first spoon and into the frying pan. Keeps my hands clean *grin*.

Everything will start to sizzle and cook and you don't want to turn them until they have gone a nice golden brown. They will be to soft to turn easily if you don't wait for them to brown and firm up on the bottom half. Flip and continue to cook until golden on both sides and they are delicious served hot with a little bit of a yogurt dill dip :)

We all loved these and what a fantastic way to get more vegetables into your diet. A plus if your kids love them as much as mine did. You can hide any vegetables you want in these if you chop them fine enough! LOL.

Enjoy :)
Rosina

PS. Looking for more yummy recipes?? Check out this week's Hearth and Soul blog hop and La Bella Vita's weekend recipe round up

Chickpea Cannelloni ~ Recipe

When daddy is away the rest of us go vegetarian *grin*.

Hubby is completely meat crazy and wants it pretty much for breakfast, lunch and dinner and by the time he leaves to go back to work the kids and I are totally ready for a meat moratorium :)

We love chickpeas so I thought it would be fun to make cannelloni with a vegetable and chickpea filling and for a first try I'm very pleased with how it turned out.

I started with:

2 large carrots
1 stalk of celery
5 cloves of garlic
2 tablespoons lemon juice
1/2 a sweet onion (approx. 1/2 cup)

I grated the celery and carrot and then pureed all of it in my blender until it was completely smooth.

Next I added:

1 egg
1 cup of ricotta cheese
1 cup cooked spinach
2 cups of chickpeas
2 big bunches of fresh basil & parsley (approx. 3/4 cup each)
Salt and pepper to taste

Add all of the above ingredients into your blender or food processor and blend until smooth. I like to puree it like this so that the kids don't know exactly what vegetables I've put in because each of them has specific likes and dislikes and if they see something they don't like they want to pick it out. This way it just tastes good *grin*. If you like more texture then you can definitely blend it less and personally if it was just for me I wouldn't blend in the spinach. It all depends on who your food critics are! LOL

Note: I used dried chickpeas. If you want to try making your own place your 1 1/4 cups of dried chickpeas in a large glass bowl with 4 cups of water and let sit overnight until morning. When you wake up transfer your beans and water to a cooking pot and make sure you have at least twice to three times as much water as your beans. Bring to a raging boil and boil uncovered on high for 10 minutes. After that reduce the heat and simmer for 1-2 hours until tender. I find it usually takes closer to the 2 hours for mine to be fully cooked. You can also do a double or triple batch of beans all at one time and through the rest of it in the freezer portioned out for future meals to save on some cooking time next time!

With your chickpeas and vegetables all mixed together add 1 cup of shredded Pecorino Romano cheese or another one of your favorite cheeses and 1/2 a cup of brown bread crumbs, stir together and you're ready to start filling your cannelloni noodles :)

Oven ready cannelloni noodles have to be the easiest type to work with because you can fill them in their rigid uncooked form but you have to have enough liquid in the pot when you cook them for them to soften properly.

So to create my tomato cooking sauce I used two tins of regular tomato sauce plus two tinfuls of water to double the volume and then added the following herbs to create an italian flavor :)

1 teaspoon dried basil
1 teaspoon oregano
1/2 teaspoon thyme
1 tablespoon onion powder

In a large 10 x 13 greased baking dish pour in enough of your tomato sauce to thoroughly cover the base of the pan.

I have to tell you I came across the EASIEST way to fill your cannelloni noodle!! Put all of your filling into a large freezer bag, snip off one of the bottom corners and you have created the perfect piping bag for filling your noodles :)

If you place the tip of the bag right inside the noodle while you're filling it, the pressure as it gets nearer the top will actually push all of the filling down towards the bottom creating an even fill. Just keep the base of the noodle against the palm of your hand to prevent it from blowing out the bottom. Don't ask me how I know that *grin*.

Place each filled noodle into your tomato sauce leaving a little bit of space in between each for expansion...

and once all of your noodles are filled and in the pan, top with the remaining tomato sauce and a sprinkle more of cheese :)

Bake at 350 degrees Fahrenheit and serve up with some garlic bread and salad :) So yummy and the kids had second helpings so I'm calling this a smashing good success! LOL

Hugs,
Rosina

PS. Looking for more yummy recipes?? Check out this week's Hearth and Soul blog hop :)