Cannelloni

This is a meal I've been making for a long time, it's a bit of a family favourite.

You need to make a really tasty sauce to start with - a tomato sauce, or bolognese, or a tomato and meat sauce. Whichever type it is, it needs to be reasonably liquidy as the pasta will absorb quite a lot of the water as it cooks.

The meat sauce I make starts with fried chopped onion and garlic (peeled, squashed and added to almost-cooked onion) and then add a couple of chops. Brown either side of the chops.

Add jar of passata and can of tomatoes, add 2/3 of the empty passata jar's worth of water. Season with salt, pepper, sugar and herbs. Simmer for as long as you can - 2 hours plus is ideal.

After an hour or so, remove chops from pan and take all meat off bones. Cut meat up into small pieces and return to the sauce. Continue to simmer the sauce. The longer you do this, the more tender the meat will be.

Towards the end of the sauce's cooking time, mix together ricotta, a beaten egg, salt, pepper and some chopped parsley - or rocket or baby spinach.

Fill the canelloni tubes with the ricotta mixture - I use a rounded dinner knife for this - it fills around 17 or 18 tubes. There's no need to cram the tubes tightly with ricotta, just as long as the filling goes right through the tubes, it doesn't matter if there are spaces.

Lay the filled pasta tubes in a large baking dish. Leave a bit of space between the tubes as they will swell as they cook.

Add the sauce to the baking dish, lift up each cannelloni tube to allow some of the sauce to go underneath. Cover the pasta and pour over a little extra water if the sauce seems a little thick.

Cover with foil and seal the edges. Cook at 180 C for 25 - 30 mins. Test the cannelloni with a knife to see if it's cooked through.

The cooked cannelloni ready to serve. Top with some cheese and eat with green salad and crusty bread.

Ingredients:
Sauce:
1 onion, chopped
2-3 cloves garlic
500 g chops - beef or veal
1 jar passata
1 small tin crushed tomatoes
dried oregano and basil - fresh if possible but dried is fine
1 tsp sugar
Filling:
500 g ricotta
1 egg
salt, pepper, chopped fresh greens such as parsley, rocket, spinach
1 packet cannelloni tubes