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.)

Sour Cream Chicken Enchiladas

Mexican is perhaps my favourite kind of food, which is slightly awkward because I live in the south west of England, which is not known for it’s Mexican cuisine.

I mean, I like pasties, too, so it’s not all bad!

We tend to have something along the lines of fajitas, enchiladas, quesadillas or burritos about once a week. It can be hard to get hold of the ingredients sometimes, but generally you can make do. One thing that always intrigues me is the idea of canned or jarred enchilada sauce, as it’s not something you can buy around here. It’s probably pretty disappointing compared to the homemade stuff, but I can’t help but wonder. Especially green enchilada sauce. I mean. Wow. What must that be like?

Anyway, I get to make my own sauce instead. The sauce I make here is based on one by the Pioneer Woman (and you can read the much better original recipe here*), however this one has been slightly adjusted to include readily available British ingredients. The rest of the enchilada recipe was based on seeing the phrase sour cream enchiladas and deciding I wanted some. With chicken.

So here is how:

Firstly, decide at 10am on a Saturday during the school holidays that you want to make enchiladas despite having none of the ingredients to hand. Secondly, drive to the supermarket only to question every life choice you have ever made when you struggle to find a parking spot, are nearly run over by an old man with a trolley, and realise that you’ve impulse bought two different varieties of condensed milk despite having no plans to use them.

Once that is all out of the way, open all the windows in the hope of tempting a breeze into your tiny kitchen, and begin.

Boil a jointed whole chicken. By which I mean start with a whole chicken, joint it, and boil it, for about 25-30 minutes. Once done, take the chicken out of the water and allow it to cool enough to handle. Save the chicken water and the bones to make stock, which will make you feel like either a witchy old grandma or the head cook in a nineteenth century country house, depending on what sort of reading you did as an early teen.

Shred the chicken once cool enough to handle, and place it to one side. This will give you way more than you need, so be prepared for leftovers.

Make your enchilada sauce (unless you have a secret supply of the jarred stuff – and if you do, please clue me in!)

Heat two tablespoons olive oil in a large saucepan. Finely dice half a medium onion and half a red bell pepper and fry for a couple of minutes while you mince/squash some garlic, then add this to the pan. Allow everything to fry until softening – another two minutes or so.

Measure in chilli powder (I went with Hot), cayenne pepper and cumin, along with a sprinkle of salt and pepper, and a crumbled stock cube. Fry together for a minute to allow the flavours to release.

Sprinkle over a tablespoon of flour and stir together for a minute before adding a glug of chicken stock (if you have any to hand, otherwise just use the water from your boiled chicken.) Give everything a really good stir, to lift the cook vegetables and spices from the bottom of the pan, and to encourage everything to turn into a paste.

Add a 500ml carton of passata and half a pint/250ml cold water. Allow everything to come to the boil, reduce the heat slightly let the mixture reduce by about a third (about 15-20 minutes, I was distracted by shredding chicken.)

Once thickened, turn of the heat and allow it to cool before using an immersion blender (a whuzzah in this household) and whuz it until smooth. You now have enchilada sauce – ta da! You won’t need all of it, but you can keep the leftovers in the fridge for (I’m guessing) three days, and it can be frozen. Buy some freezerproof soup bags – I’m always meaning to!

For the filling, grate a lot of cheese. Again, Monterey Jack isn’t readily available round these here parts, so plan big then settle on cheddar. I had a ball of mozerella in the fridge that was dangerously close to it’s expiry date, so that got torn up as well. Dice a load of spring onions as well. This filling is very mild and creamy, which is good because I forgot to mention that the enchilada sauce is hot.

Get a nice big bowl ready. Add 150ml of sour cream (half a pot if using a tall pots), six spring onions, half a teaspoon of chives and about a tablespoon of finely chopped coriander. Give it a stir, then add two large handfuls of shredded chicken and a large handful of grated cheese. If you have mozzarella hanging around, throw that in too. Add a good sprinkle of black pepper. Mix everything thoroughly. If it looks a little dry, just add more of the sour cream. Next time I may put the whole pot in.

Warm eight small tortillas in the microwave for thirty seconds. While they are warming, lay out your chicken mix, you saucepan of enchilada sauce, grated cheese, and a large rectangular dish around a chopping board – this will be your incredibly messy workstation. Once everything is to hand, dunk a tortilla into the enchilada sauce and lay in on the chopping board. Add about two spoonfuls of the chicken mix and roll it tight. Place it in the baking dish and repeat with the other seven tortillas. You’ll have to squeeze them in tight!

Then, if you are like me and can’t leave well enough alone, spoon over some more of the enchilada sauce. Then some of the left over sour cream. Once you are finally done messing, top with grated cheese and place on a baking tray. Bake in a preheated oven until everything bubbles and the cheese is catching at the edges (20-30 minutes.)

Serve with salad or rice, and dips of your choice. Or peach salsa, which I also made today and will post about later.

Sour Cream Chicken Enchiladas

8 small tortillas

enchilada sauce

2 handfuls shredded chicken

150ml sour cream

1 handful grated mature cheddar

1 ball mozzarella, torn – optional

6 spring onions, finely sliced

1 tsp chives, finely sliced

black pepper

2-3 handfuls more grated cheddar

Enchilada sauce recipe

2 tbsp olive oil

half a medium onion, finely diced

half a red bell pepper, finely diced

2 cloves garlic, minced

1 tsp cumin

1 tsp chilli powder

1/4 tsp cayenne pepper

1 chicken or vegetable stock cube

salt and pepper

1 tbsp plain flour

1/2 cup chicken stock or reserved chicken cooking liquid

500ml carton of passata

half a pint/250ml cold water

*Annoyingly this link will open on my phone but not on my laptop – apologies in advance if you experience any difficulties

I am boiling a chicken

I mean, it’s a gloriously hot sunny day, so why wouldn’t I choose to spend it inside, boiling a bird?

Continue reading “I am boiling a chicken” →