Cannelloni with ricotta and spinach is the recipe that could be defined as a Sunday classic. Imagine sitting at the table with your family, with a freshly baked pan of steaming cannelloni in the center. Soft and enveloping, but also tasty, they can also be prepared in the days before and then baked just before lunch or dinner. Furthermore, if there is time, you can also prepare homemade egg pasta and bechamel, which will give an even better flavour to this traditional Italian recipe.
Today we used ready-made pasta, while for the filling, in addition to the béchamel, ricotta and spinach, we will use nutmeg to flavor and a handful of grated Grana Padano, which we will also need for the crust effect on the surface. Let’s see all the ingredients and let’s go straight to the kitchen to try our hand at this preparation.
Variants
Let’s now see some variations of this delicious first course. A very popular version is the one with a tomato sauce-based condiment. If you want to prepare it, the recipe is the same but you will simply have to add some tomato puree to the bottom of the baking dish and on top of the cannelloni before baking them, without forgetting the Grana Padano as the last layer for a perfect gratin. For other quick recipes, you can experiment with many different fillings, perhaps adding minced beef or pork to the mixture, which you can first cook in a pan and then add to the other ingredients, or cooked ham, which you can just break it into small pieces. If, however, you want to twist the recipe a bit, instead of spinach you can use other seasonal vegetables or use mushrooms, perhaps during the autumn period, or even pumpkin. In both cases, first cook the ingredients in a pan and then create a filling always using the ricotta, the flavourings, an egg and the grated cheese.