Cheesy Wheels

Apparently these are very a popular part of school dinners here in Devon, although I’d never heard of them until a friend from work passed on the recipe. Mashed potato and cheese, baked in a puff pastry case, these are a quick and easy tea. Just don’t be tempted to eat them straight out of the oven – not only will you risk burning your tongue, but the taste really develops if given just ten to twenty minutes to cool.

The original recipe calls for mustard powder, but I can’t resist adding cayenne to cheese and pastry dishes. I’ve added plenty of fresh ground black pepper as well, but you can leave this out if you wish. I’ve not tried adding onion, but I think a little would probably be delicious, as would chives.

Just a couple of tips, these can be a be a bit unwieldy, so don’t add too much liquid to your mashed potato (I just used a bit of butter, and forwent the usual milk) and allow it to cool a bit before you use it. Pre-rolled puff pasty comes on a sheet of paper – leave it on this when you roll it out flat, that way you can lift the paper to begin rolling the pastry which will give you a bit more control.

Cheesy Wheels

Makes 12

Ingredients:

230g ready rolled puff pastry

200g mashed potato

175g grated cheese

1/4 tsp cayenne pepper

Salt and pepper to taste

50ml semi skimmed milk

Method:

This recipe is great for using up mashed potato, but if you make it specially for this dish then be careful not to make it too loose. Perhaps omit most of the usual amount of milk you would use. The cheese will stop the end pastry from being too dry.

In a large bowl, mix the potato with the cheese, cayenne pepper and seasoning. Roll out you puff pastry with the long side towards you, leaving it on the greaseproof paper it was rolled in. Spread the potato mix evenly on top, leaving a small gap along the edge furthest from you. Brush a little milk along this edge, which will become your seam.

Begin to roll the pastry away from you. It might be easiest if you lift the pastry by the paper that it sits on. Roll it gently like so that it resembles a Swiss roll and then cut into 1 inch/2.5 cm slices.

Place the sliced on two lightly greased baking trays and bake at 200°C for 25-30 minutes until golden brown. Allow to cool for 10-20 minutes before serving.

Courgette & Spinach Ricotta Cannelloni

Remember Spinach and Ricotta Cannelloni? It used to be on every menu back in the 90s, and I loved it! The additional of courgette (zucchini) brings this up to date, and adds a little robustness to the dish.

Long story short, my uncle and his partner came to say with us for a couple of nights. We planned on takeaway for the Friday, but Thursday night still needed to be catered for. My aunt is vegetarian and I needed something that a) could be made in advance and left in the fridge overnight and b) everyone would enjoy.

I also have a lot of courgettes at the moment. And spinach does have a tendency to disappear once cooked, making it hard to stretch four ways. I may have raided the fridge, and come up trumps.

Most courgette lasagne and cannelloni dishes use lemon and mint – and can you blame them, it’s a delicious combination – however I already have one go-to lemon-mint-courgette dish in the form of lasagne roll ups, and wanted this to be different.

There are a few parts to this dish, however you can cut corners by using premade tomato sauce for the base. I made this midweek, to be eaten the following evening, however if you don’t demand an early dinner this can easily be made and eaten the same day.

The tomato sauce is not complex, but is all about the basil. Often I will use pesto to achieve this, but this time I went with both fresh and dried basil for real depth of flavour. The sugar in the recipe is optional, but I find that tomatoes can often have an acidic sourness to them, and the addition of sugar is there to round these off. Brown sugar, with its caramel flavours, gives a bit more depth.

Last up, I somehow managed to take plenty of process photos, but not a single picture of the completed dish. I also managed to drop my phone in the bath, so there is also a chance that I did take photos, but lost them somewhere in the bubbly depths of the bathtub. Enjoy the random shots of grated courgette instead!

Tomato Sauce

1 medium onion diced

1 tin chopped tomatoes

500 ml pasatta

1 dessert spoon brown sugar

1 tsp dried basil

3-4 leaves fresh basil, finely chopped

Method:

Fry the onion until soft, but not browned. Add all other ingredients and bring to a gentle boil. Cook for 15 minutes, reduce the heat, and check the seasoning. Remove from heat and allow to cool for 10 minutes before using an immersion blender to blend into a smooth sauce. If the sauce is too loose you can continue to cook over a gentle heat until needed.

Ricotta Filling

1 onion

1 packet fresh spinach

1 medium courgette, roughly grated

250g fresh ricotta

1 tbsp parmesan

handful grated cheddar (optional)

1 egg

salt and black pepper

Method:

Cook the spinach in a dry frying pan until completely wilted. Remove from the pan and allow to cool enough to handle before squeezing out the excess liquid. Grate the courgette and squeeze out the excess liquid from this as well. Fry the onion until soft, then add the courgette and cook down. Add the spinach and stir well. Remove from the heat and allow to cool.

In a separate bowl, mix all the other ingredients, seasoning to taste. Add the cooled vegetable mix and stir well. Season to taste.

Cannelloni, 12 – 16 tubes

Cheese sauce

1 tbsp butter

1 tbsp plain flour

300 ml milk

1-2 tbsp parmensan

Cheddar cheese, grated, to top

Method:

Melt the butter in a saucepan. Add the flour and allow to cool, stirring constantly. Add the milk and stir together. If lumps appear, whisk until smooth. Heat the milk until almost boiling then remove from the heat and add the cheese.

To assemble:

Be aware, this will probably make more than one dish’ worth, more like a dish and a half. I like to make a mini cannelloni to freeze for later.

Pour a thick layer of tomato sauce into a 8″x12″ dish, or thereabouts.

Using a teaspoon (and probably your fingers) carefully fill the uncooked cannelloni tubes with the spinach mixture. You will want 2-3 filled tubes per person. Sit these in the tomato sauce in a single layer. If you have extra filled tubes left over, make a smaller cannelloni – it freezes well and can be cooked from frozen.

Cover the pasta with cheese sauce and sprinkle over grated cheddar. Bake at 200°C for half an hour. Serve with salad and garlic bread.

Cheese and Tomato Stromboli

I feel I ought to apologise: I started this blog, and then failed to post anything. I’ve just been so busy that the few times I was in long enough to cook, there just wasn’t time to take any photos.

It’s all been about pizza and anniversaries this week!

Our wedding anniversary was on Wednesday. We’re both very busy at work at the moment, and with it being midweek we decided to have the least fussy celebration ever by simply eating takeaway pizza in front of a movie. This was how we spent more than one night back when we first got together, so it held more romance for us than that description might convey.

Friday night was the 30th anniversary of the release of the movie Heathers, starring Winona Ryder and Christian Slater. I went to a screening with a friend who had never seen it before. She was kind enough to feed me first – pizza and dough balls!

You think I would have had enough of anything pizza related by this point, but Phil mentioned that we ought to pick up a Stromboli while we were at the supermarket this morning to use as a side dish this evening. Of course, the supermarket no longer sell it, so I decided to make this on the spur of the moment.

This is a simple cheese and tomato version, designed to be served on the side of a past dish, although ham, salami, pepperoni or similar can be used as a filling if to create a more robust version.

Not a quick bake, unless you have pizza dough and tomato sauce to hand, in which case this is a lightening-fast side dish or even a meal in itself. I had some Cheat’s Pizza Sauce in the freezer, else I probably wouldn’t have gone to this amount of effort for a side dish.

To warn you, this version is not dainty and is meant to serve up to six as a side dish. It will easily serve two as a main meal. Feel free to half these amounts if catering for fewer.

This is basically pizza dough, rolled into a sausage and sliced into to allow the layers to show.

I’ll happily admit that I found this pizza dough recipe online at the amazing Lauren’s Latest and I adore it. She calls fail proof, and far it has been!

Serves: 6

Prep: 1 hour 20 minutes (10 minutes if using pre-made pizza dough)

Cooking time: 10 minutes

Ingredients:

Dough:

8 fl oz / 240 ml warm water

2 1/4 tsp instant yeast

1 tbsp honey

2 tbsp olive oil

1 tsp salt

13 oz / 370g strong plain flour

Filling:

Pizza sauce (jarred, fresh or Cheats Pizza Sauce)

Grated cheddar cheese

1 egg, whisked

Method:

If you are using pre-made or shop-bought pizza dough, then skip this step and roll out your dough.

Place the warm water, honey and yeast into a bowl (of a stand mixer with a dough hook attached, if you possess such a thing), stir gently and leave for 5 – 10 minutes for the mixture to foam. Add the salt, olive oil and half of the flour and combine. Then add the rest of the flour until the it reaches the correct consistency (it will stop accepting flour after a time – you may only need 12 oz / 340g.)

You now need to knead the heck out of it – a good 5 – 7 minutes, which is why a stand mixer is so helpful. If you don’t have a stand mixer, or if 5+ minutes of kneading is likely to finish it off, roll up your sleeves and get stuck in. You’ll get a rest afterwards while it rises.

Once the dough is all stretchy and springy, place it in a fresh, lightly oiled bowl and cover lightly and leave for at least an hour in a warm, draft-free place. I got distracted and left it for two hours, and it was perfect. Basically you want the dough to at least double in size.

Preheat your oven to 220°C.

Lightly flour your work surface and roll your dough out into a rectangle (about 10″x12″, but honestly this will depend on your dough and how thin you can get it).

I didn’t take a picture of this part (annoyingly as it’s the one bit that might actually need instruction.) Using the narrow side as the base, spread your pizza sauce over two thirds of the dough, leaving an inch clear at the top and bottom. Brush the un-sauced dough with egg wash.

Fold over the top and bottom edges to keep everything tucked inside. Next, fold the empty third over. Continuing folding until the dough is folded into a fat sausage shape and press the edge to seal.

Place your dough roll onto your baking tray and use a sharp knife to slice into the dough, exposing the layers inside. Cut at an 45°angle, about and inch and a half apart. Brush with egg wash and bake in a hot oven until golden brown (about 8-10 minutes.)