As I promised yesterday, here is the freezer-friendly spinach manicotti recipe.

A couple tricks I’ve learned from making any dish that requires you to stuff the pasta:

• I add a little oil to the cooking water.  I know this is normally a no-no because I’ve heard it prevents the sauce from adhering to the pasta.  But I always had a problem with my cooked shells sticking together after I drained and cooled them.  Adding a little oil prevents this.
• I slightly undercook my pasta by about two minutes less than the shortest recommended cooking time.  This makes the pasta easier to handle, prevents tearing as you’re trying to add the filling, and prevents the pasta from getting mushy when you finish baking the finished dish in the oven.
• Filling manicotti shells is a pain in the butt.  If you do a lot of cake or cookie decorating, you may have piping bags on hand.  These work great!  However, if you don’t you can do like I do and scoop your filling into a plastic storage bag, snip a corner off, and voila!  You have a homemade piping bag.  Again, I like the Ziploc vacuum seal bags for this because they are more heavy duty and won’t tear at the seams.

I prefer homemade spaghetti sauce over store bought.  I don’t care what Ragu or Prego say on TV, they don’t taste like homemade.  However, for a dish like this where you’ve got a lot of other things going on and the sauce is not necessarily the star of the show, I will use store bought and doctor it up with some of my own ingredients.  If you look closely at the picture, you’ll notice a few chunks of meat.  I added that for the Carnivore Husband so he wouldn’t complain about being served spinach manicotti.  I always go for the big 26-ounce cans of sauce on the bottom shelf that are a couple dollars cheaper than the jars positioned at eye-level  (grocery stores are sneaky like that).

For your convenience, I’ve added freezing instructions to the notes section of the recipe.