Cannelloni is probably the easiest stuffed pasta to make. Use egg roll wrappers instead of sfoglia (homemade egg pasta) and you have a dish you can make in about 30 minutes. Tonight I used a classic filling made with ricotta cheese, mixed with an equal amount of chopped spinach, some grated parmesan, egg, salt to taste and a pinch of nutmeg. To make the cannelloni, just lay out the egg roll wrapper, pipe a goodly band of filling along one edge, and roll it up starting from the edge with the filling. Separately, make a very light and 'loose' tomato sauce, with just a bit of oil into which you put a slightly smashed clove of garlic, adding crushed canned tomatoes when you can just begin to smell a whiff of the garlic and simmering with a bit of salt and torn up leaves of fresh basil for about 10 to 15 minutes. Oil a baking dish that is a bit wider than the cannelloni are long (to allow them to expand as they bake), spoon out some tomato sauce on the bottom of the dish and then lay the cannelloni out side by side. Nap the cannelloni with more tomato sauce so that their tops and sides are fully covered with sauce, grate over some more grated parmesan cheese, and bake in a hot oven (400F, 200C) for about 15-20 minutes, or until the sauce bubbles and the top is just slightly browned. Let the dish settle for a minute or two and serve with additional sauce and cheese for those who want.TIPS: There's another method of filling cannelloni, which is to spread the filling over almost the entire surface of the pasta square (leaving a bit of space one end so that when you roll it up, the filling will not leak out). The theory to this method is that being in contact with the stuffing will keep the pasta soft and moist, while pasta rolled around pasta may dry out. I've made them both ways and like both methods. When using egg roll wrappers, which are extremely thin, I think the method mentioned in the basic recipe works better.
The usual Italian method of pre-cooking spinach is to wash the spinach leaves, place them in a dry skillet or pan with just the water that clings to them and cook them, covered, over moderate heat until they wilt. You then run the leaves under cold water, squeeze them well and chop them. (If you are using a food processor, just throw them into the processor bowl whole.) As I've said before, frozen chopped spinach will do fine, although fresh spinach, especially baby spinach as I used tonight, gives the filling a wonderfully delicate flavor.
NOTE: Besides this spinach and ricotta filling, cannelloni come with various other fillings. A minced veal or beef filling is probably the most common, but you will also find pure cheese fillings, chicken fillings, sausage fillings, asparagus... the sky's the limit, really. Perhaps even more often than tomato sauce, in Italy cannelloni--especially the ones with more delicate fillings--are topped with bechamel and grated cheese and dotted with butter. According to Wikipedia, cannelloni were invented by one Chef Salvatore Coletta in Sorrento (near Naples) in 1907. These days, however, you will find cannelloni just about everywhere in Italy.
There are a number of similar dishes out there. Italians also make something called crespelle, sometimes called by the French word crepes, where the pasta is substituted by a thin egg batter cooked into, well, a crepe. I associate crespelle with Tuscany, but I'm not sure if they are from there. And then there are also my personal favorite, fazzoletti della nonna, literally "Grandma's handkerchiefs", or just fazzoletti, a bit thicker than crespelle and folded around their filling into a triangular shape and laid out like roof shingles in the baking dish. (See our 16 May post for the recipe.)
Final NOTE for readers in the US: Buying canned tomatoes is a tricky thing in the States. When I first moved from Italy, I ran into all sorts of trouble trying to find a brand of canned tomatoes that 'behaved' properly. The main problem being that, for some strange reason, no matter how much I cooked the canned tomatoes, then never seemed to melt as they should into a sauce. I then found out that Americans like their canned tomatoes that way, and manufacturers add calcium chloride to canned tomatoes to keep them from falling apart! Of course, when you are using canned tomatoes to make a sauce, firmness (especially artificially induced firmness) is not a positive quality. So I now stick to either imported Italian canned tomatoes or American 'crushed' tomatoes. If you buy Italian canned tomatoes, however, you also need to be careful. For reasons having to do with US tariffs, Italian canned tomatoes come packed in puree rather than simple juice as they are in Italy, so what you get is rather too thick and need to be diluted with a bit of water. For this dish, you'll need to add even more, as you want a loose sauce that can reduce as the cannelloni cook in the oven. Their taste is, unfortunately, not as pure as it should be because of the puree, but it is better than having chunks of raw canned tomato in your sauce! (I realize that some people like chunky tomato sauce, but it's not very Italian.) For more information and some recommendations on brands, see this post on buying canned tomatoes.
