Cannelloni with basil, spinach, mushroom and pinenuts.

Cannelloni is one of my favourite stuffed pasta dishes. It wasn't always the way. Any memories I had of making it from scratch used to terrify me. I'd envisage endless hours of blending, piping, reducing, stuffing, simmering, layering, baking, chopping, and sauce dripping from your hair, minced veg form the ceiling.

I challenged my daemons and nailed this delicious and simple cannelloni dish. When you look at it like this it really is the most simple stuffed pasta dish there is. Compared to making your own ravioli or a lasagna it's a walk in the park. It's  about focusing on two components: the mushroom stuffing for the cannelloni, and the tomato sauce for the topping. In between that there's some piping and chopping but get some help and it's all relatively quick and easy and very much worth it in the end.

The trick to make this cannelloni exceptional is to get the tomato topping to be very well done before removing it from the oven. Once the tomato sauce has taken on an almost brown bubbling, and gooey appearance it's ready and will taste like rich sun-dried tomatoes, which go so well with the mushroom, basil, spinach and pine nut stuffing.

Ingredients:
Few tbsp of olive oil
150g spinach
large bunch of basil
4 garlic cloves
400-500g mixed mushrooms
1 tsp nutmeg
50g pine nuts
100g feta
2 tbsp ricotta
1 red onion
2 x 400g tins of chopped tomatoes
1 tsp chili flakes
1 tbsp sugar
1 tbsp mushroom ketchup
salt and pepper for seasoning
250g cannelloni (half a pack)
100g of grated cheddar or Parmasan or half and half

A few green leaves to serve (or left over spinach)

Oven-proof dish and a piping bag or sandwich bag

Pre-heat the oven to 200 degrees C

Rinse the spinach and basil under cold water. Leave in colander and don't over shake the water off.

Heat 2 tbsps olive oil in a frying pan over a medium heat and add the spinach and basil. Toss one or twice and cook through until it is fully wilted. Place back in the colander for a few seconds. Roughly chop and put in a large mixing bowl.

Re-heat 2 tbsps of olive oil in the same pan (no need to rinse) over a medium heat. Whilst heating, peel and roughly chop 2 garlic cloves and add to the pan.

Give them a stir and leave to cook on a low heat for a minute or so. Whilst they're on clean and roughly chop the mushrooms. Once the garlic has softened add all the mushrooms to the pan with the nutmeg and a couple of pinches of salt and pepper seasoning cook for approximately 8 minutes (until they have sufficiently softened and browned).

Whilst they are cooking get a deep pan out and heat 1 tbsp of olive oil in over a medium heat. Whilst heating through, finely chop about two thirds of the red onion. Leave the small remainder to through over the raw salad leaves at the end; chopped in half moons.

Peel and finely chop two more large cloves of garlic. Add the finely chopped section of the red onion and the garlic to the heated oil. Stir for a few minutes and cook through until softened. Tear in the remainder of your basil. Leaves and the fine stems attached can all go in. If it's a cut bunch just roughly tear by hand the whole lot. For a growing bunch pick the fine stalks and leaves and tear and throw in.

Give this a quick coating of the oil and onions and add the two tins of chopped tomatoes and some salt and pepper pinches. Bring to the boil for a few seconds. Reduce the heat and add the chilli flakes and mushrooms ketchup. Leave to cook for a further 5 minutes whilst you do the next bit.

Add the now cooked mushrooms to the spinach. Put the empty mushroom pan straight back on the heat and add a little more oil and add the pine nuts. Cook for a few minutes until they turn golden. Add to the mushroom and spinach mix.

Let this cool and crumble in the feta and the ricotta and season. Whizz the whole lot with a hand held blender to a smooth paste. Set aside.

With the tomato sauce you want to sieve it back into the pan. You can either get a new pan or do it over the mushroom/pine nut pan. Get one where you can rest the sieve over the top (as in the picture below) so it makes life easier for you to do other things. You want this all to sieve through so help it along with the back of a spoon; pushing through.

When you have the remains similar to what you can see in the picture scrape these out on to the base of a medium sized oven-proof dish and add a drizzle of the tomato sauce from the pan to evenly cover the base with a very thin layer of sauce. (You can probably fill about 14 cannelloni tubes with this amount of stuffing so get a dish that will either accommodate two rows of seven or one of fourteen however best you can fit them in the smaller the surface area the better as the tomato sauce comes out better if spread over a more concentrated area and so is thicker).

Leave the sieved sauce on a medium heat to reduce and get a little thicker whilst you fill the cannelloni.

This is easiest with a piping bag, if you don't have this use the cut corner of a sandwich bag or a tea-spoon.

Fill the bag with the mushroom paste and stand the tube upright on kitchen role, pipe the paste from bottom to top and lay each full tube however you wish to arrange them flat on the base of your dish.

If you don't have enough room for more cannelloni but have paste left (which is what happens to me) I spread the remainder over the top of cannelloni. Drizzle a little olive oil over this layer.

Cover this layer with the remainder of your tomato sauce. Then sprinkle this with grated cheese or parmasan and cook in the pre-heated oven for 40 minutes. You want it to have slightly turned a deepish redy-brown on top so it looks almost caramalised. This gives it that wonderful sun-dried tomato flavour.

Leave it to sit for 5 minutes to cool and throw your remaining onion in a bowl with some roughly chopped salad leaves or remaining spinach leaves and a little olive oil and lemon juice and serve with the cannelloni.