Go ahead and make a mess: Chicken Spinach Cannelloni Pie

Here’s the thing: most cooking isn’t hard. While I don’t particularly want to tackle homemade phyllo dough or anything that involves a candy thermometer, you basically do all the same things to cook whatever it is you’re cooking. The only true complication, in my mind, is the number of dishes you’re willing to wash in order to accomplish a given dish.

This particular recipe was worth the sinkful, especially since I roped the rest of the family into washing most of it. I was in dire need of some comfort food and this riff on stuffed cannelloni really spoke to me; it’s like lasagna but better (and with more dishes). Yesterday was sunny and warm – relatively speaking, because it’s February – and the demands of sunny-day comfort foods are different than those of cold, sunless days. I wasn’t quite ready to bury myself in a pile of mashed potatoes or cassoulet but something rich and cheesy hit just the right balance. Plus I didn’t have to make a giant mess of myself trying to stuff cannelloni noodles – if you have a technique for doing this without ending up with cheese on every available surface, do please let me know.

I did take some shortcuts here. For starters, I didn’t think I needed to be a purist and make my own tomato sauce for something that had so much else going on. I also took out a few of the “put this in a bowl and this other thing in another bowl” instructions because that just seemed silly. If you’re combining two bowls of mixed ingredients, just throw them all in the same bowl and make sure you mix everything really well. Voila, one less dish to wash! And there was no way in hell I was making my own fresh pasta sheet to fit the pan; ready-to-bake GF lasagna noodles were plenty good enough for me. (To be fair, the recipe didn’t explicitly call for making your own lasagna noodles. But how else do you find individual fresh noodles to fit a 13x9 pan? No such thing exists unless you roll it out yourself and hell no.)

I suppose you could cheat further and use a doctored-up jarred alfredo sauce, but I don’t think much of them and this sauce was easy enough to make. It probably would have been easier to work with if I hadn’t stuck it in the fridge for a couple of hours but this is why we have spatulas, yes? The recipe notes point out that you could make this sauce on its own and serve it with seafood pasta, which would be delightful too.

Adapted from Pot Pies: Comfort Food Under Cover by Diane Phillips, a book that I aspire to cook my way through.

Chicken Spinach Cannelloni Pie

For the sauce:
6 Tbsp butter
1 clove garlic, mashed (or a big spoonful of garlic paste, because 1 clove does nothing whatsoever)
6 Tbsp flour (GF blend works fine. If yours is heavy in cornstarch, you might want to use a little less)
3 cups milk
½ tsp salt
6 shakes hot sauce (I used Red Hot)
Pinch of grated nutmeg
½ cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese (cheat and use the pre-grated stuff NOT in the green can though)

For the pie:
1 10-oz package frozen chopped spinach, thawed if you think to take it out in time
2 cups chopped cooked chicken
¼ cup chopped parsley
3 large eggs
2 cups ricotta cheese (measure, don’t just dump a huge container in there or you’ll end up with too much filling and the end result will be much messier than needed)
¾ cup Parmesan cheese
1 tsp salt
½ tsp or more freshly ground pepper
1 jar prepared tomato sauce (or your own, if you’re feeling it)
Lasagna noodles of your choice, cooked if that’s what the package tells you to do

 

Make the sauce:

Melt the butter in a medium saucepan and add the garlic and cook for a minute or two. Stir in the flour and cook the roux for a couple of minutes, until it bubbles a little. Whisk in the milk and spices and cook until the sauce is thick and creamy. Stir in the Parmesan until it melts.

Assemble the pie:

Beat the eggs in a medium mixing bowl, the add the spinach, chicken, parsley, ricotta, and ½ cup of the Parmesan and mix really well. You can do the spinach, chicken and parsley in one bowl and the eggs, ricotta, and Parmesan in another, but you’re just going to mix them together anyway so why bother dirtying an extra bowl. Salt and pepper to taste.

Put ½ cup tomato sauce in the bottom of a 13x9 pan, which you may or may not have remembered to coat with non-stick cooking spray. Put down a layer of noodles and spread half the filling over it. Cover with another layer of noodles.

Cover the noodle layer with half the cream sauce, then stripe it with some tomato sauce (this took about ¾ cup or so but I wasn’t measuring by this point). Cover with the remaining filling and top with another layer of noodles. Note that there is not a layer of noodles between the two layers of filling; if you add one, this will not fit in your pan for some reason and you’ll make a giant mess in your oven. This is not a hypothetical situation. If you’ve made lasagna a thousand times and think you know better than Diane Phillips, you’re wrong.  

Cover with the remaining cream sauce, then the rest of the tomato sauce. Sprinkle with the ¼ cup remaining Parmesan cheese.

 Bake at 350 for 45 minutes, then let it rest at least 10 minutes before cutting into it. If you get impatient and cut it sooner, you’ll make a giant mess.

Tasty Dystopian Glop for Dinner: Wife Soup

Cold, depressing winter days call for soup. If you're feeling low because we've seen the sun for approximately 30 minutes in the last 3 months here in Michigan, might I suggest something inspired by the always-low-key-depressed crew of the Serenity? 

For any of you that aren't nerds, Serenity is the name of the spaceship in Firefly, our favorite "cancelled so far ahead of its time that it inspired a nerd uprising that got a movie made" sci-fi show. The crew does crime to survive, and their perpetual poverty is sometimes referred to via the apparently horrible food they have to eat. The only bright spot in this gastronomic wasteland is something referred to as "wife soup," as Zoe will make this for her husband Wash when he's been especially good. I found a recipe inspired by this in one of our Christmas cookbook acquisitions, "The Geeky Chef Cookbook." If you're a fan of - well, anything - you'll find a recipe here, from Zelda to Doctor Who, The Wheel of Time to Breaking Bad. 

I will say this about Wife Soup: if I was on a beat-up spacecraft at the farthest reaches of known space, half-starving and on the run from the authorities, I'd find this pretty comforting. If I was in my dreary Michigan kitchen looking at random produce in my refrigerator, I'd find it pretty inspiring. Regardless of location, I'd find it to be weird-looking; it's seriously green and very thick, just the sort of dystopian glop that fits my current mood. So, so tasty though. There's a big kick of black pepper that warms you right up, and you can feel virtuous as hell for eating something that's so full of vegetables. 

Adapted slightly from "The Geeky Chef Cookbook" by Cassandra Reeder, The Geeky Chef, whose ingenuity and sheer range of fandoms I absolutely admire. Please buy this for the nerds in your life.  

Wife Soup 

2 Tbsp olive oil or butter 
1 large onion, chipped 
1 tsp salt 
2 ribs celery, ideally with the leaves 
1 tsp black pepper 
2 cloves minced garlic 
2 russet potatoes, peeled and chopped 
1 cup split peas (I used split lentils because that's what I had) 
4 cups (or more - much more) chicken or vegetable stock 
2 cups broccoli florets
2 zucchini, chopped 
5 fresh basil leaves (or 2 tsp dried, if your fresh basil got nasty in the fridge) 
1 tsp onion powder
1 tsp garlic powder 
1 Tbsp lemon juice

Heat the olive oil or butter in a large saucepan, then add the onion and salt and saute until it begins to turn transculent. Add the celery and black pepper and cook another 5- minute. Add the garlic when the celery starts to soften. 

Add the potatoes, split peas (or lentils), and stock. Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat, cover, and simmer about 45 minutes - 1 hour, until the potatoes and peas (or lentils) are soft.

Stir in the broccoli and zucchini. Simmer until the broccoli is tender; add more stock or water if needed. Stir in the spinach, basil, onion powder, and garlic powder. 

Puree in a blender (your immersion blender probably can't handle this). Stir in the lemon juice (if you remember it), maybe add a pinch of cayenne, and salt and pepper to taste. 

The Third-Best Shawarma in the World

I like to pick up new cookbooks when we travel, ideally something related to the area we're visiting. This is why I inexplicably came home with a Middle Eastern cookbook after visiting my cousin in St. Louis. We've enjoyed all the recipes we've made from it, even the not-very-successful Tunisian tuna brik (operator error, I assure you). There are quite a few snacky items, vegetable chips and such, and I love the storytelling in the introductions. There are a few recipes I've made just because I liked the story. 

Our hands-down favorite is a recipe for shawarma. In this house, we are shawarma snobs; we've been spoiled by the good stuff and have developed unfortunately high standards as a result (we discover this anew every time we try to eat Middle Eastern food outside of the metro Detroit area. I don't know why we keep trying. Surely other parts of the country have Lebanese grandmothers?). The Very Best Shawarma in the world comes from Mideast Oasis in Royal Oak, where Halim will sometimes make you a fresh cup of coffee and ply you with pastries while he cooks your shawarma to order. There are a lot of contenders for second-best, but I'll give this a solid third place which I think is pretty impressive considering it comes from a home kitchen. 

This recipe, fittingly titled The Home Shawarma Experience, does a fine job of satisfying my little food snobs. It doubled, triples, and quadruples beautifully and can be used for chicken or beef instead of lamb. Chop your meat and it fills a sandwich or tops a Flaming Moe*; use bone-in chicken thighs and you've got perfectly portioned buffet servings. I've yet to have leftovers of this no matter how much I make. The recipe is forgiving enough that I don't actually use measuring spoons anymore, and if your house has the misfortune to be dairy-free you can leave out the yogurt and just increase the cider vinegar and olive oil.  

Do please make this yourself. You'll be so happy you did. 

* Have I not mentioned the Flaming Moe? It's basically fattoush topped with mjadara and shawarma, based on an occasional special at the restaurant my sister used to work at. It's fabulous. 

Recipe adapted from New Middle Eastern Street Food by Sally Butcher. My version is much less informative and amusing.

The Third-Best Shawarma in the World 

For every 2 pounds of meat, mix together the following: 

1 cup plain yogurt 
6 cloves minced garlic (or equivalent amount of garlic paste, which is great when you're making 10 pounds of meat) 
2 tsp cinnamon
2 tsp allspice
1 tsp cardamom
1 tsp cumin
1/2 tsp cloves
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1 tsp salt 
3 Tbsp apple cider vinegar
2 Tbsp olive oil

Mix all the ingredients together and marinate your meat in it for up to 24 hours. The recipe calls for lamb shoulder, but I almost always make chicken. Grill, broil, or saute the meat, depending on the cut of meat, time of year and/or personal inclination. One caveat: you can use chicken breasts for this, but chicken thighs are much, much tastier. 

Properly, this is wrapped in pita bread with garlic sauce and pickles and a little cabbage salad with slivered tomato and cucumber. It's just as good served alongside some rice pilaf, piled on the aforementioned Flaming Moe, or popped into a slow cooker for a buffet where it will make lots of people very happy.