Stuffed Cannelloni with Vegetables

How to choose the ingredients

1. Pick the tubes to fit your baking dish. The number of cannelloni depends less on the amount of vegetable filling than on the size of the dish you have. All the tubes should fit freely in a single layer. For example, the disposable foil dish I used held 8 cannelloni.

   

2. Prepare the vegetables for the filling and for the sauce the cannelloni will bake in: they should be fresh and, if possible, young. For the filling, choose carrots, onion, garlic, parsley and basil, plus seasonal vegetables: eggplant, pepper, tomatoes.

   

   For the sauce you need a cup of ready-made homemade tomato sauce or 2-3 large ripe tomatoes, a bell pepper and garlic. The sauce is easy to make, whatever the source of the tomato.

   

How to make the vegetable filling

3. Bake the eggplant in the oven or microwave until soft, when a knife goes in easily.

4. Fry the carrot with the pepper and onion. Peel the carrot and cut it into cubes. Heat 2 tbsp of olive oil in a frying pan and fry the carrot until soft and lightly golden. Then add the finely chopped bell pepper and the diced onion. Fry everything together over medium heat, stirring.

   

5. Stew the vegetables with the tomato. Scald one tomato with boiling water, remove the seeds and skin, and chop it with a knife. Add the chopped tomato pulp to the fried vegetables, then add salt and pepper to taste. Reduce the heat, cover the pan with a lid and stew the vegetables over low heat for about 10 mins. The carrot should be completely cooked.

   

6. Add the eggplant, garlic and herbs. Cut the baked eggplant in half lengthwise, scoop out the flesh with a spoon and chop it with a knife. Peel a clove of garlic and chop it. Pick the leaves off the parsley and basil sprigs and chop them, leaving a little for serving. Add the eggplant pulp, herbs and garlic to the fried vegetables all at once.

   

   Stir the vegetables and fry for 1 min. Then turn off the heat, cover the pan with a lid and let the vegetables cool for 10-15 mins.

   

How to make the tomato sauce

7. While the filling cools, fry the pepper for the sauce. Homemade tomato sauce is the ideal choice. Otherwise, remove the seeds and skin from the remaining tomatoes, scalding them with boiling water in the same way, and blend the pulp into a purée. Heat 1 tbsp of olive oil in a small frying pan and fry the finely chopped bell pepper in it. The pepper should start to brown but not burn.

   

8. Add the tomato sauce or fresh tomato purée, 1-2 cloves of chopped garlic, a pinch of grated nutmeg and 0.5 tsp of sugar (2 g). Salt and pepper to taste. Keep in mind that homemade tomato sauce already contains spices, so season to your own taste. Simmer the sauce under a lid over medium heat for 10 mins.

   

How to stuff and bake the cannelloni

9. Fill each cannelloni tube in turn with the cooled vegetable filling. Don’t pack it in too hard: put in as much filling as fits without pressing it down. Put the stuffed cannelloni on a plate.

   

10. Put the cannelloni in the dish and cover with sauce. Pour a quarter of the prepared tomato sauce onto the bottom of the baking dish and spread it evenly. By the way, the sauce is quite hot, and if you use an aluminum dish you can get burned. It is better to set the dish on a ceramic or other heatproof plate beforehand and put it into the oven on that. It is both handier and safer.

    

    Lay the stuffed cannelloni in the dish on the sauce. Whether you leave gaps or not doesn’t matter much: the pasta swells a little as it bakes and fills any gaps anyway. But don’t pile the stuffed tubes into a heap either.

    

    Carefully pour all the remaining tomato sauce over the pasta. The sauce should fill all the gaps, and all the pasta should be covered by it. This matters, because the pasta has to cook and soften, and without contact with the liquid sauce some parts of it will stay hard. If there isn’t enough sauce, it’s fine to add a little boiling water or plain tomato juice.

    

11. Put the dish into an oven heated to 220°C. Dishes like this usually bake for 20-30 mins. But keep in mind that a large amount of filling and sauce takes quite a while to heat up until the liquid boils. So keep an eye on it and note when the sauce in the dish starts to boil.

    

    Pasta usually cooks in about 10 mins, so if you let the dish bubble for 10-12 mins from the start of boiling, the stuffed cannelloni will be completely done. Take the dish out of the oven.

Serving

12. Arrange the cannelloni on plates, spoon the sauce from the dish over them and sprinkle with finely chopped herbs. Serve the pasta with vegetables hot, before it cools.

    

    Stuffed cannelloni with vegetables are a delicious dish, and the tomato sauce gives it a certain refined piquancy. If you like, add a little finely chopped hot pepper pod to the filling and sauce.