Baked Manicotti

For Day 3 of BM, I made this hearty and comforting baked pasta dish. Turning on the oven makes the kitchen nice and toasty -- perfect for chilly winter nights, so you know where I spend most of my time in winters ;-). This is a stuffed pasta dish with creamy Swiss chard and ricotta filling smothered in spicy tomato sauce and topped with lots of cheese -- great to please a crowd.

Stuffing traditional manicotti/ canneloni pasta can be tricky since cooked pasta tubes are very delicate and have a tendency to tear. So to make life easy I used no-boil lasagna noodles, an idea borrowed from Cook's Country magazine. Filling recipe is adapted from Giada's Swiss Chard & Pea Manicotti. Here's how I made it.

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Mooli Paratha

For Day 2 of BM# 10, I made some good old Indian style winter comfort food --- mooli paratha. These parathas are made with daikon radish which is generally available in the winter. My husband is not a big fan of mooli, so I followed Rak’s recipe to cook the mooli before stuffing in the paratha. Parathas turned out hearty and delicious, not stinky at all like my husband predicted.

  

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Homemade Hot Chocolate

I can’t believe it’s end of November and we will be in a brand NEW year in little more than a month’s time. Time seems to fly with no worries, but here we are trying to play catch up with time. My space has been quiet for some time now due to a personal tragedy and I’m still struggling to pull myself together to do anything. But I thought Blogging marathon and hosting Kid’s Delight event will cheer me up and get me back into cooking and into the upcoming holiday mood. 

So here I am ready for another edition of Blogging marathon. Thanks to Valli for organizing 10 successful BMs this year. I picked “Winter Special Dishes” as my theme. Growing up in Southern India where the temperatures are mild to high throughout the year, dishes remain the same almost throughout the year. We use seasonally available produce, but the basic dish did not change dramatically. It’s only after coming to chilly northeast US that I realized the reason and need for making winter “special” dishes. Weather in winter makes me want to just curl up under a throw with a hot bowl of soup to warm up. 

These are the reasons I think what makes a dish “winter special”:

• Warms you up from within when eaten, like a soup. 
• Warms up the house when cooked/ baked, like a baked pasta dish etc. 
• Use produce available in winter, like winter squashes etc. 
• Since winter also means Holiday season, any dish that is rich and festive falls under this category too. 

 

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Kid’s Delight Event Announcement – Deceptively Delicious

I am sure most of you would agree that you would prefer a healthy brownie with beets/ spinach in it instead of a bowl of salad greens. I know I definitely would. Brownie to me means rich, decadent and it does not matter if it is made with healthy ingredients and is completely raw. It’s the look and feel of the food that we are so used to that matter most. 

The same is true for kid’s foods. I’ll bet my son would rather eat that brownie without complaining than eat just beets & spinach as sides. So for this month’s Kid’s Delight event, I’m looking for dishes that are "deceptively" delicious. Make your kids’ favorite dish healthier by adding nutritious ingredients but still make it tasting good and looking delicious. 

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