Baked Pasta Rolls/Sideways Canneloni

Hope everyone had an amazing Christmas and New Year!

This recipe is probably the only good thing to have come out of eating nothing but restaurant food for two months (apart from increased fatness-linked winter warmth). My colleagues and I ate at Jamie's Italian on a couple of occasions and enjoyed it - however it's not exactly great for veggies, because although there are a few options which are either veggie already or easily adaptable, nothing is labelled and they are pretty indiscriminate with the Parmesan so you have to just trust the knowledge of your waiter/waitress when it comes to making a choice!

This recipe is an amalgamation of what I ended up eating in Jamie's Italian - which they called Honeycomb Canneloni - and a recipe from Jamie's website called Squash & Spinach Pasta Rotolo. I've picked the best of both worlds when it comes to the filling - half have a spinach and feta filling, half have aubergine and sun-dried tomato. There's no reason why you can't experiment with different stuff, let me know in the comments if you hit on something incredible! I've labelled the recipe steps which relate to the different fillings, so you can ignore one and double the quantity of the other if you like.

Although it's pretty fiddly - I felt like I had 10 thumbs when I was trying to do the rolls - it looks really pretty and is a great variation on boring old canneloni.

Serves 4

What you need

olive oil

6 fresh lasgne sheets (or dried, pre-boiled)

300g fresh spinach

1 onion (chopped)

half a standard-size block of veggie feta

pinch of nutmeg

500ml passata

50g mature cheddar or 25g faux-parmesan

4 cloves garlic, crushed

2 aubergines

a good handful sun-dried tomatoes

a few fresh basil leaves (optional)

salt & pepper

What to do

Aubergine filling - First, slice both the aubergines in half vertically (stalks removed) and score across the cut side in a criss-cross pattern like you would a mango. Place in a baking dish. Drizzle each half with a tablespoon of olive oil (sorry for chronic unhealth but aubergine is such an oil sponge) and place in the oven at 180 degrees for about half an hour until soft all the way through. Set aside to cool.

Spinach filling - While the aubergines are doing, you can be sorting your spinach. Heat a tablespoon of oil in a saucepan and add the onion. Fry until softened and starting to brown at the edges, then add the spinach and put the lid on the pan. Leave for about 5 minutes until the spinach has wilted, then season liberally with salt, pepper and the nutmeg before taking off the heat. Pour off any excess liquid that's come off the spinach.

Aubergine filling - When the cooked aubergine is cool, scrape the flesh out of the skin and mash it with a fork. Cut up the sun-dried tomatoes (I find scissors easiest) and stir them in. Season with salt and pepper. 

Heat a small amount of oil in a large frying pan (So much oil! So many pans! I know, I know) and add the crushed garlic. Wait until it's sizzling but not burning, then pour in the passata. Bring to the boil, then turn off the heat. 

Now for the fiddly part. Lay out one lasagne sheet at a time on a plate or board. It helps to spray or brush the surface with a small amount of oil to stop it sticking. Make sure both your fillings and the feta are within reach.

Spread the lasagne sheet with your chosen filling - alternate fillings when you change sheet to make sure it's half and half - adding a crumbled handful of feta to the spinach one, then roll up like a tiny pasta carpet. Slice each roll into three, and place each roll carefully into the pan with the passata. Place them side by side until the pan is full.

Grate over your cheese of choice and scatter over the basil if you're using. Bake in a 180 degree oven for around half an hour until golden brown.

Serve with garlic bread or a green salad, depending on the degree of January diet austerity you're enforcing.

Spinach Pasta Soufflé Bake

I am back from the horrible wilderness of exam time. I haven't posted anything in absolutely ages, but I honestly haven't produced anything that was even worth eating, let alone blogging! We have been living on convenience food while I frantically tried to learn how to do accounting in time to pass the exam. But it's over now, and what better way to welcome myself back into the kitchen but with a recipe from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's wonderful Veg Every Day.

This is a tasty cross between a pasta bake and a soufflé, with the added bonus of spinach and a decent amount of cheese. Absolutely impossible to veganise though unfortunately, there really is no substitute that I'm aware of for the wizardry of beaten egg white.

We're still dieting too, I make this just under 400 calories a portion if you use semi-skimmed milk and low fat cheese, which is pretttty good for something involving the unholy trinity of pasta, butter and cheese.

For the original recipe and plenty more brilliant stuff besides, Veg Every Day is available here.

I also realised while photographing this that there is no way to make this food look good. Oh well.

Serves 4

What you need

1 onion, chopped

100g pasta of any shape - except spaghetti, that would be weird

200g fresh spinach

50g butter

50g plain flour

300ml semi-skimmed or whole milk

3 eggs, separated into yolk and white. Hugh suggests one extra egg white but that strikes me as unnecessary ballache, and problem of spare egg yolk. Up to you.

60g mature cheddar cheese

salt, pepper, nutmeg

What to do

Heat either a small amount of olive oil or some frylight, and fry off the onion until soft and golden. Set to one side.

Put the pasta on to boil, following the pack instructions for cooking time, then drain and again set to one side.

Wilt the spinach - easiest way is by putting it in a colander and pouring boiling water over it. Make sure to really squeeze as much water as you can out of the wilted spinach or you'll have a very soggy bake. Try either squashing it with a potato masher or putting it in a clean tea towel and squeezing (flush it with cold water first if you do that, or you'll burn your hands! Stating the obvious but you never know!). Use kitchen scissors to snip the spinach into pieces. 

Melt the butter in a heavy-based saucepan over a medium heat. When melted, add the flour all at once and whisk furiously with a balloon whisk until any lumps have gone. Cook for one minute, then add the milk little by little, whisking all the time. Keep whisking until the mixture has come to the boil. You should have a thickish bechamel sauce. Turn the heat off, then stir in the onion, egg yolks, cheese, nutmeg, spinach, salt and pepper. Stir the cooked pasta into the sauce.

In a pristinely-clean bowl, use an electric whisk to beat the egg whites until they are at the firm peaks stage. Stir a spoonful into your spinach and pasta mixture just to loosen it, then carefully fold the rest of the whites in, taking care not to knock too much of the air out.

Transfer the lot to a baking dish and bake at 190 degrees for 25-30 minutes, or until risen and golden brown. 

Have fun!

Courgette, Chilli and Pine Nut Tagliatelle

We're on a bit of a weight loss mission at the moment, scary stuff. Soooo where my normal way of eating pasta is smothering it in cheese and sauce, I've been experimenting with some slightly less artery-fuzzing options. I did the courgettes in Fry-Light (that stuff makes me shudder slightly but it's a necessary evil) and by my maths it works out at under 500 calories per person.

The flavours in this are a bit of a swan-song to summer - it's almost autumn, in fact as I'm typing there's even a Christmas re-run of QI on in the background which is just making me feel all wrong. So may I present some  happy summertime type food before we all plunge back into dark and cold and misery.

Dead easy to veganise, just make sure your pasta is egg-free (most dried varieties are) and leave off the cheese.

Serves 2
What you need

2  medium-sized courgettes
200g tagliatelle (or whatever pasta you've got!)
1 medium-hot red chilli (finely chopped and seeds removed if you don't want too much heat)
2 cloves garlic (crushed)
a small handful of pine nuts (about 10-15g)
2 tbsps olive oil (or Fry-Light if, like us, you are a masochist)
juice of half a lemon (optional)
a few shavings vegetarian parmesan-style cheese
salt and pepper to taste

What to do

Courgettes first. Top and tail them then, with a potato peeler, thinly slice the two courgettes length-wise into ribbons.

Heat half of the olive oil (or depressing Fry-Light) in a ridged griddle pan. If you don't have a griddle pan, a normal non-stick frying pan will be absolutely fine but you won't get the dark ridge marks. When the pan is up to temperature lay out the courgette ribbons, turning when they are starting to brown. It won't take long because they're so thin! You'll probably need to do this in batches, unless you have a monstrous catering-size griddle pan, so pop them on a plate as they're done. It doesn't matter if they get cold, they'll warm back up when you eventually add them to the pasta.

In the mean time, heat a separate dry frying pan and add your pine nuts. Keep shaking the pan until they're evenly toasted all over, then put them on one side. At this point you should also start boiling a pan of water ready for the pasta.

In the same pan (no point creating extra washing up), add the rest of the olive oil, the garlic and the chilli. Keep a careful eye on it because you don't want it to brown, just to sweat slightly so you lose the harshness of the raw garlic. Put that on one side as well when done.

The pasta water will hopefully now be at a rolling boil, so add your tagliatelle and cook for however long the pack says, usually about 10 minutes. Drain it and put it back in the pan.

Toss the courgette ribbons, chilli, garlic and the lemon juice if using, as well as a decent amount of good-quality salt and pepper in with the tagliatelle - the heat from the pasta should warm the courgette etc. back up if it's gone a bit cold.

Plate up and sprinkle over the 'parmesan' shavings.

Now go and sit outside with a glass of chilled white wine and pretend we all live in Italy. Mmm.