Spinach & Ricotta Cannelloni

I had quite an interesting cooking experience today, the end result was marvelous but the process was quite frazzling.  Now here I am sitting on the floor thinking to myself how happy I am that it’s over. My theme for this week was Italian, oh boy how I do love pasta. I decided on making a Spinach & Ricotta Cannelloni recipe that I found in my recent Jamie Oliver magazine.

I guess you might be thinking why another Jamie Oliver recipe and the answer is simply because I like his recipes (even though I don’t always understand his choice of ingredients). Whenever I look at recipes I tend to look at the pictures first and the pictures in his magazines are simply divine. They are so vibrant that it would be a sin not to cook them.

After “memorizing” the recipe, I knew I was going to have to personalize it mainly because I am not a big fan of spinach. I can eat spinach but only in small quantities. There is something so wrong about eating it; and I am yet to meet someone who absolutely loves it –loves it in a way that I love strawberries on a hot summer’s day with lots of sugar on it.

This recipe called for multi-tasking which I can normally do but multi-taking while cooking is quite a different story. Let’s just say I had “crap” scattered all over the place. I started by cutting up some onions and two cloves of garlic which I put aside for a bit. I was suppose to use fresh spinach leaves but that didn’t happen because I am currently located in Poland and Poland is well know known for cabbage and I still have to find a store that sells all kinds of fresh herbs. I cheated and used a frozen bag of shredded spinach which I dumped into a medium sided pot and seasoned it with salt, pepper and nutmeg. One minute later I removed it from the pot and set it to one side. I then added the chopped onion, garlic, two tins of tomatoes, a bay leave and some lemon zest into the post. The recipe itself stated that we should just season it with some salt and pepper but let me tell you, that is not the case. Seasoning tomato sauce with just salt and pepper in my opinion is simply not enough. Tomatoes tend to have a bitter taste and need to be sweetened with a little something extra. My tomato sauce was seasoned with salt, pepper, sugar, curry and red wine. It was sweet with a bit of a spicy kick. While my tomato sauce was simmering I moved onto the next step and this is where I personalized the recipe. I took out a jar of homemade bolognaise and poured half of the sauce into a small pot (there is nothing wrong with good quality bolognaise) and then added some raw ground beef (some of you might know this as mince) and cooked it for about twenty minutes.

My next step was creating a spinach stuffing which consisted of using the previously cooked spinach, about 250grams of ricotta cheese, some parmesan cheese and one egg. I was suppose to use a piping bag (what the hell is a piping bag?) but I don’t own any of those fancy bags so I simply used a regular freezer Ziploc bag and had one of my roommate spoon the mixture into the bag.  This was my first time stuffing cannelloni tubes and let me tell you it was not an easy job. Never stuff food wearing your pajamas people; I learned the hard way today that it’s not a very smart idea. Please do not judge me for cooking dinner in my pj’s because Sundays are my “don’t care how I look kind of days” and I am allowed to me and do whatever I please.

Now getting back to stuffing the cannelloni, I had somehow managed to splatter

spinach all over my top -guess that happens when one squeezes the mixture to fast. I then took the bolognaise and stuffed the remainder of the cannelloni’s and let me tell you this is where the “fun” really started. I had to cut a small opening in my “piping” bag and a piece of plastic fell into the cannelloni as it was being filled (no I did not remove it because I could not be bothered re-filling the tube and just prayed that no one would come across the plastic) and after I had filled all the tubs, I poured the sauce over and layered some fresh mozzarella cheese on top and into the oven it went for approximately 40 minutes.

While my pasta dish was baking, I started preparing a side order of grilled zucchini which is my favorite vegetable dish thus far and so easy to make. I simply sliced up the zucchini, seasoned with it with salt and pepper, dipped it into an egg and breadcrumb mixture and fried it for six minutes and bam – zucchini is ready. Italians love bread so I decided to make my own garlic bread. As I was chopping up some garlic I accidentally cut my finger…lovely just what I needed, my second disaster but after a quick mini band-aid break I was ready to get back into the ring and finished this meal. When the pasta was ready I quickly put the garlic bread into the oven and five minutes later we were all ready to eat. (a small note here that when I opened the oven door I was greeted by a slap of smoke that went straight to my eyes – disaster number three….)

Dinner however was delicious. The pasta sauce was rich but not in an overwhelming way with a bit of sweetness and spiciness to it. The cannelloni’s were sooo good but I preferred the bolognaise ones rather then the spinach ones. My last disaster of the evening happened when I took my first bite and bit into the plastic that had previously fallen in. Oh well, guess it was just my luck. I really enjoyed my cannelloni experience but I have never cooked something where I had so many bad things happen to me. Dinner was a tasty success and I am going to think of my little disasters as luck for my next upcoming cooking journey.