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.