What did I make for lunch? Creamy baked spinach and pine nuts pasta

Due to circumstances, the main meal in our household is a late four o'clock-ish lunch. Or does that already fall in the dinner time slot? Either way, most of the time I scramble to cook something from the ingredients that found their way into my pantry. 

Then I google for recipes, just to check if there is something edible I can make out of what I think would go well together. 

Yesterday it was a bag of frozen spinach, so this was the recipe I started out with, but then I found some mozzarella and thought, well why not bake the whole thing, mozzarella really gives you the crunchy crust on the top, without being too greasy.

So, if you're still with me after this ramble here's what I did, and what you need to replicate it.

For four hungry vegetarians:

• 500 g pasta (I used Barilla orecchiette, because they were there, but really any pasta will be fine)
• One bag of frozen leaf spinach (600 g, depends on how big of a spinach fan you are, use fresh spinach if it is in season)
• One handful of pine nuts (optional, I like them and had them in the fridge)
• Two blobs of mozzarella 
• Some Parmesan cheese 
• A little olive oil
• Salt, pepper, garlic, nutmeg
• Optional: sun-dried tomatoes, chopped

Method:

Cook the pasta according to instructions on the box, it's better if they're a bit al dente, because you are going to put them in an oven later. 

Turn on the oven to 170°C. Chop the pine nuts (or leave them whole, I'm not the boss of you).

Heat a pan and slightly toast the pine nuts, be careful not to burn them. Then add the olive oil and spinach. Saute the spinach for about ten minutes on medium heat and add the seasonings to taste. I grated in some Parmesan, because I love the taste of it and it makes it a bit more creamy, but if you're trying to trim your figure I'd recommend you skip this one. 

Add the drained pasta to the spinach and mix together. 

Prepare a baking dish, grease it if necessary, and pour in the mixture of pasta and spinach. Top with mozzarella and sun dried tomatoes pieces and put in the oven until the top forms a nice crust. You'll probably have to turn on the grill option of your oven. It's not gonna take long, since all the ingredients are already cooked and there are no eggs in the recipe, but our oven is a bit volatile so it took about 15 minutes. 

The whole thing should take you less than 40 minutes, depends on how good your oven grill is and what is the cooking time of your pasta. My end result looked like this:

Oh yeah, here are those potato-quality pictures of food we all love so much. 

But I do hope you give this a try, it's delicious and easy.