Yesterday was my boyfriend’s and my one year anniversary. Although both of us are completely clueless in the kitchen, we decided to try our hand at making dinner together. We didn’t want to spend too much money, so we scoured my cabinets and fridge for food to see what I already had. I found about 3 cans of tuna, so we went on to Recipe4Living to find an easy tuna recipe. After a few minutes of searching, we found a recipe for Tuna-Stuffed Pasta Shells. It didn’t sound too difficult and we had most of the ingredients already, so we decided to give it a shot.
We assembled the ingredients (shown below) and we were ready to start.
The first thing we had to do was cook the pasta shells. We followed the directions on the box and cooked them for about 12 minutes to get the perfect al-dente texture. As the pasta was cooking, we started making the filling. First, we finely chopped the onion. Then we combined the tuna, cottage cheese, onion, lemon juice, and dill weed in a bowl to create the mixture shown below. We left out the parsley, as we didn’t have any and felt it wouldn’t add too much to the recipe.
By this point, the pasta was finished cooking, so we put it in a strainer while we made the sauce. We mixed up some more cottage cheese and dill weed, along with yogurt and garlic powder. We accidentally also added the parmesan cheese to the mixture, as well. Because it was supposed to go on the top of the shells anyways, I don’t think it made that much of a difference.
Finally, we got to stuffing the shells. There was just enough filling for a moderate amount in each shell. The stuffed shells were placed seam-side down on a baking dish. We used a smaller baking dish than suggested, so we had to stack some of the shells on top of each other.
Finally, we covered the shells in sauce. Here is what the finished product looked like:
The shells then went into the oven at 350 degrees. Thirty minutes later, we took them out of the oven and served ‘em up! We served our shells with peas, as the shells themselves didn’t really have any veggies in them.
How did they taste? They were pretty good, but a little bit bland. It seemed as if there wasn’t enough flavorful sauce to cover every shell, so that might be why. If you decide to make this recipe at home, try increasing the amount of sauce you make or adding more herbs and spices. With a little bit more flavor, this dish would be a hit!
Here are some other canned tuna recipes to try:
