Syn Free Cannelloni

Nothing nicer than a comforting baked pasta is there? Nice and filling and tasty too! 

The original recipe calls for 8 pasta tubes but be warned, I filled 13 with this quantity. The tubes from Tesco were only about an inch thick so the recipe must have used gigantic tubes! Be aware of the tube size when buying them. 13 tubes between 2 sounds an awful lot but it wasn't. Trust me!

This is meant to serves 4 but unless you have it with a side salad or something else, half of what we had last night wouldn’t have been filling enough for a main meal, especially as there was no meat.

Serves 2 as a main meal with no accompaniment or 4 as a lunch / with extras


Ingredients 

8 cannelloni tubes (see note above)
Fresh Basil
Parmesan from your HEXA option or other meltable cheese from HEXA
227g fresh spinach
227g fat-free cottage cheese
freshly grated nutmeg (dried will do fine)
1 egg yolk
Salt & pepper
Dried herbs
Garlic
1 pint passata
1 garlic clove, crushed
1 carrot
1 onion
1 celery stick
1tsp beef bovril
Boiling water


Method

Pre heat oven to 200 degrees
Dice the carrot, onion and celery and fry in Fry Light and garlic until soft and the onion is translucent translucent
Make up the bovril with half a cup of boiling water to make a stock
Add the passata, herbs and bovril stock and simmer gently until thickened

To make the filling put the spinach in a saucepan with 2 tablespoons of water. Cover with a lid and cook very gently over a low heat for about 5 minutes, until the leaves are limp and bright green.
Drain very well, pressing down on top of the spinach with a saucer to squeeze out all the liquid. You need to get it as dry as possible

Chop the spinach and mix with the cottage cheese, nutmeg, egg yolk, garlic, herbs and seasoning. Spoon the filling into the cannelloni tubes and arrange them in an ovenproof / lasagne dish.

Pour over the tomato sauce, sprinkle with your cheese option and tear the fresh basil leaves over the top.
Bake for about 30 minutes until the pasta is soft and the cheese is bubbly.

The cannelloni filling can taste a little bland once cooked so it's super important to add lots of flavours before it goes in to the tubes. I'm a garlic fiend so it gets lots of garlic and herbs for us.