Sauce is a quick sauce with 16 oz can of Tomato Sauce, a small can of tomato paste, fennel, onions, garlic, Italian seasoning, red wine, and salt and pepper.
Perhaps not that quick, but usually I cook my pasta sauce for 24 hours – this sauce cooked for about 3 hours to develop the flavors.
Boil the Manicotti shells. Cook these for 2 minutes less than what the instructions call for and DO NOT RINSE. Instead take them out of the hot water carefully (so they don’t rip) and lay them down on paper towels to dry. (I cooked 14 to wind up with 12 – 2 or 3, depending on one’s appetite is usually enough, especially if you have side-dishes to go along with this.
Filling is 1-pound cooked ground hamburger (break it up pretty well when cooking so that the ground beef chunks are pretty small), a bag of frozen spinach (thawed and all the water squeezed out), 1 cup ricotta, 1/2 cup mozzarella, 1/4 cup parmigiano reggiano, garlic, onion powder, salt, pepper, Italian seasoning, oregano, and 2 eggs. Blend everything together with a spoon and set aside.
Get a large baking dish and pour in some sauce to completely cover the bottom. Start filling your shells with your meat and spinach mixture. Use a teaspoon or your fingers to tightly fill the shells. Once filled add to baking dish. Keep going until you run out of shells or the mixture.
Next, add more cheese. I added mozzarella, jack and sharp cheddar. On top of that, I added 12 1-teaspoon dollops of ricotta, evenly spaced, then, more sauce, more cheese and sprinkled more parmigiano reggiano on the top.
Cover this with foil and then bake in a 350 degree preheated over for 45 minutes.
Note: You can substitute parmigiano reggiano with parmesan cheese.
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