Ricotta….and then more ricotta….

We have been eating an awful lot of dishes with ricotta in them lately! Why?

His patient self (my wonderfully patient partner) works at a food company supplying to cafes, shops, schools, restaurants etc and he often brings home stock that is nearing its expiry or ‘best before' date and can't be sold. Usually it is frozen food and therefore able to go straight into the freezer. However, last weekend he brought home two large, (well large to me who only usually buys the little tubs!) packages of ricotta cheese.

I often make cannelloni and lasagne with ricotta cheese but must admit i haven't really been very creative with it so had to search around for some new recipes as we really didn't want to waste free food and although we have frozen some wedges i'm not sure how successful that will be. Has anyone tried freezing ricotta?

His patient self found a few recipes he wanted to try and i must say his Spinach and Ricotta Gnocchi was absolutely scrumptious and not just because i got a night off from cooking!! You can find the recipe here. We actually didn't use the walnut sage sauce although it sounded nice….i made a hearty tomato based sauce with lots of vegies from the garden just to make it a bit more filling. Wish i had taken a photo because it looked so nice!

The next night i made a Baked Spinach and Ricotta Cannelloni but used silverbeet from the garden instead. I also used fresh lasagne sheets and just rolled up as cannelloni (so much easier than filling those awful little tubes i think!!) and added some lentils to the mix to stretch the meal out a little more!The colours were lovely as i was mixing…a very simple recipe which can be found here .

Last night my lovely partner got cooking again and made Eggplant Ricotta Parmigiana…..you can find the recipe here. It was a really tasty light meal for a Sunday night and made excellent leftovers for lunch!

We still have a fair bit of ricotta left so i need to do some more searching for recipes…trying to stay away from cheesecakes and sweets though! Do you have any favourite ricotta recipes you would like to share or share a link to? I did try a lemon ricotta teacake but it was very dense and i was a little disappointed! I am going to search out some toddler friendly options later today and hopefully get some baking done tomorrow.

Just finished a declutter and scrub of the kitchen, popped a loaf of bread in the oven and feeling like cooking…shame nap time is nearly at an end! Still raining here (and terribly humid!) so off to try and think of some ideas to keep us busy this afternoon!!

Let me know if you have any ideas for ricotta or if you have had success freezing it!

Thanks so much for dropping by and all your comments last week…….

Jode x