Homemade cannelloni

I have an ongoing battle with myself. It happens in the grocery store, at the farmers’ market, at Costco. Every time I walk past a packet of fresh pasta, whether it’s noodles or ravioli or whatever, I have a momentary urge to make it mine, regardless of what I’ve put on the meal plan for the week and am supposed to be buying at that moment. My appetite for fresh pasta is insatiable.

But then the battle happens. It’s entirely internal, and it goes something like this:

Id: Ooooh, fresh pasta! Let’s have some of that.

Super-ego: Look at that price! What a rip-off! We could make that at home for a fraction of that cost.

Id: But it’s so much work. And I want some now.

Super-ego: Tough toenails. Homemade is not only way cheaper, it tastes about a million times better and it’s not that much work. We’re not wasting money or calories on this garbage.

Id: But I want some noooow.

And so it goes. The super-ego almost always wins; after the economic and aesthetic arguments are exhausted, we can always move on to the political/moral arguments (we shouldn’t encourage Big Food; whatever happened to concentrating on single-ingredient items? etc., etc.) until the id, which really has only the one argument, caves.

And every so often, the id is rewarded with a batch of homemade pasta – inexpensive, delicious, and morally upright. (Probably super-calorific as well, but who’s counting?)

Homemade cannelloni

These give you all the flavors of ravioli with a lot less work. For making, I follow essentially the same procedure as for making ravioli, with two significant differences:

1)    I mix a batch of sautéed greens (spinach, kale, chard – whatever you’ve got going on) into the filling.

2)    After rolling out the dough, I cut it into squares, place filling as shown, roll up, and place in a baking dish.

As with ravioli, I think serving these with a basic marinara sauce (I put some in the bottom of the baking dish, spread some over the cannelloni, and keep some more hot on the stove for serving) and topped with a shower of grated pecorino romano is the best way of showing off the flavor combination.