Four Cheese Stuffed Pasta Shells

When I am preparing to cook, one of the many pleasures I get is from simply pulling together ingredients from the pantry, fridge, or from our garden. It’s kind of like staging for what’s ahead, seeing what is ready to be tossed into something delicious. It’s calming to view my collected ingredients as the natural light filters in through our large windows, glimpsing the garden outside and watching the chickens roam around and sometimes a few cows too. It’s wonderful to be living life how I’ve always dreamed, entwined with nature.

A few months ago, we received the Good Foods Award for our Vache cheese, (vache is cow in French). I compare it to goat chevre, it’s deliciously creamy and spreadable. We have a constant supply in our refrigerator and use it as a daily cheese. It can be substituted for cream cheese in almost any recipe. I also like to use our Natural Rind Gouda in place of a Parmigiano cheese, since it’s dry and grates easily. We also make a farmer’s cheese, plain or with chives, it is my go to for replacing ricotta and never fails. These four cheeses blended together into a light texture creates the stuffing we need for our cooked shells. 

Stuffing pasta shells keeps me on my toes for timing and makes sure I have everything ready for the filling. If I don’t have stuffing shells, I’ll take cooked lasagna and roll up each strip with the stuffing and cook them the same as I do the shells. It’s so fun for me to use pasta shells, it brings me back to the 70s when I only ate tofu as a non-dairy hippie. 

Tofu is wonderful! When Roger and I bought the dairy farm 23 years ago I would have never believed I would be in a dairy filled lifestyle. I was raised without drinking milk! My mom said milk wasn’t good for me because I had asthma. Which is another long story, but I now know there’s no problem at all between me and dairy products. Most of my life beforehand was about non dairy eating. We ate lots and lots of tofu. I used to send my daughter to school with tofu eggless sandwiches in her lunchbox and she would tell me she was the only kid who had anything like it. Now I love having endless healthy choices to utilize our farm fresh dairy products. Although I still make sure to keep the refrigerator stocked with a fresh carton of firm tofu. It’s great with any veggies and a dash of five-star spice and tamari, and easy to fry up.

Anyways, back to how I pulled together my findings from the fridge to stuff pasta shells with our own organic farm milk cheese. It was delicious and so fun to make.

I poured one half of a 32 oz. jar of pasta sauce onto the bottom of a 9” x 13’ baking dish. I arranged the shells with the open side up onto the sauce and poured the remaining sauce on top along with half of the allotted mozzarella.