Pasta bolognesa was my favourite dish as a kid. We had it I think once every week. Canelones was another big one but my mum didnt cook it that often as it was more time consuming assembling the canelones and preparing the white sauce.
Anyway, I wanted to try the spinach version so I found this recipe that looked nice. I used lasagna sheets cut in two for the canelones and worked nicely.
Ingredients for filling
- 12 lasagna sheets
- 250g frozen spinach (put in boiling water to unfreeze)
- 1 chopped onion
- 1 piece of garlic
- 1 boiled egg
- 20g of pine nuts
- a bit of grated parmesan cheese (or similar hard cheese)
Ingredients for bechamel sauce:
- 2-3 big tsp of plain flour
- 25g of butter
- nutmeg
- salt and pepper
- 200ml milk
- grated parmesan cheese
Process
- Boil 1l water in a pan, with salt and a bit of olive oil. Once boiling, put lasagna sheet in 2-3 at each time. They should be ready in a couple of minutes (they should float). Remove and leave it rest.
- In a sauce pan, heat some oil, add the onion and garlic. Until soft
- Add the unfrozen spinach, keep stirring.
- Add the pine nuts and the boiled egg (cut in small pieces). Salt and pepper.
- Add a bit of cheese.
- Retire from the heat.
- In a saucepan, melt the butter, add the flour little by little until forming a paste.
- Start adding the milk, again little by little stirring without stopping. This is at low-medium heat. Add nutmet, salt and pepper. Taste from time to time. Add the cheese at the end.
- Once you have a sauce that is not very liquid neither thick, we are ready to assemble everything.
- Pre-heat oven at 200C
- Put some of the bechamel in the spinach mix and stir.
- Prepare an oven dish. Put some butter or bechamel sauce in the dish to avoid stickiness.
- Take the cold lasagne sheets, cut in two squares. In each square put a spoon of the spinach mix and roll like a canelone. Put in the oven dish in lines.
- Once you the oven dish covered with canelones, pour the bechamel soauce on top of them. Add some grated cheese. I had some tomato sauce left over and I add it too.
- Put the oven dish in the oven. 30m or until the top is grilled.
- Let it cool down a bit and ready to eat!
