Canneloni filled with chicken and spinach

The Spinach in my vegetable garden is looking beautiful and I have been cooking a lot of spinach lately!! I have also been freezing the spinach after blanching them! 

I also made my famous spinach and feta cheesecake! But still there is a lot of spinach left. Spinach is very easy to grow in any home vegetable garden and since it contains vitamin C and minerals such as iron, calcium and magnesium it is a great vegetable to grow and feed to your loved ones! 

But one can only cook it so many times! BG reminded me that I used to make a spinach and chicken filled cannelloni, which were wonderful and very popular amongst my family members! 

I could remember making this vaguely and searched my own blog, and yes, there it was!! But as always I adapted it somewhat! This is actually a repost! If you want to see my previous post about the same dish (sort of…) you can go here! 

So last Saturday we made this dish again and it was really a team effort because it is a lot of work. The end-result, however, is one of the tastiest dishes. BG made the pasta dough and Hubs, VG and Boykie made the pasta! BG made the filling and I made the topping and between BG and me we made the final cannelloni. 

Ingredients:

Pasta

15 Homemade Pasta sheets, (rectangles of approximately 12 x 15 cm) made like this:

750ml cake flour

1.5ml salt

3 large eggs

10ml olive oil 

Sift the flour and salt together and put onto a clean surface heaped up.

Make a well in the centre and add the eggs and the olive oil.

Using a fork, bring the flour in from the sides and mix with the eggs. Once it begins to form a soft dough, start to mix with your hands.

Knead the dough for approximately 4 minutes until smooth and elastic.

Divide the dough into 6 to 8 balls. Work with 1 ball at a time and keep the others covered. Flatten the ball slightly with the palm of your hand or a rolling pin.

Run the dough through the thickest setting of your pasta machine, fold up and run 3 times more through the thickest setting.

After this run it through the machine on a thinner setting and repeat through a thinner setting. (For cannelloni I just go through till the second last thinnest setting).

Cut into rectangles of 12 x 15cm and leave on clean cloths, until required.

Filling:

300g of Baby spinach leaves, cooked and drained of all water

45ml olive oil

15ml butter

800g chicken fillets, cubed

125g of bacon, diced

1 onion, chopped

2 garlic cloves, crushed

2 eggs

125ml cream

Salt and pepper to taste 

Heat the oil and butter in a heavy based pot and fry the chicken, bacon, onion and garlic until the chicken is cooked. Remove from heat and cool.

Process the chicken mixture together with the cooked spinach in a food processor and process until roughly minced.

Add the eggs and cream and mix well.

Season with salt and pepper. 

Sauce

45ml olive oil

15ml butter

2 onions, chopped

2 garlic cloves, crushed

2 x 410g tinned tomatoes

30ml tomato puree

3 bay leaves

10ml sugar

Salt and pepper to taste 

Heat the oil and butter in a heavy based pot and sauté the onions and garlic until soft.

Add the Tomatoes, with juice, tomato puree, bay leaves and sugar.

Season with salt and pepper.

Cook for 30 minutes on low heat.

Cool down slightly and process in a food processor until smooth. 

Topping

250ml grated cheddar cheese

Parmesan (optional)

To put together:

Preheat the oven to 180ºC.

Butter one large oven dish or individual oven dishes.

Cook the Pasta sheets, one at a time in boiling salted water for 1 minute.

Remove with a slotted spoon and place on a clean kitchen cloth.

Place the filling onto the pasta sheets and roll up to form cylinders. Place in the oven dish. (If using individual dishes, place 2 to 3 cylinders in a dish).

Cover with the sauce and top with the cheddar cheese.

Bake for 20 minutes.

Top with parmesan (optional), and serve with a salad.

Related posts:

Canneloni with a meatloaf filling, topped with a tomato sauce MIM 7: Lemon and poppy seed Chicken Pasta sauce MIM 6: Pitas filled with Chicken, Rocket and Peppadews Spinach and ricotta gnocchi with a tomato sauce