Tofu & Spinach Cannelloni

Whilst flipping through BBC's Good Food magazine sometimes there is a recipe that just jumps out at me and practically screams that I have to try it. This was such a recipe.

I finally had the chance to make Tofu & Spinach Cannelloni which had caught my eye in June’s Good Food magazine. I think it was mainly the fact that the recipe used silken tofu and I am keen to figure out how to use it more often (especially since buying it by accident once and not knowing what to do with it).

Plus I’ve learned a couple of important lessons from my efforts at making this dish. What was classified as an ‘easy’ recipe turned into a fight against unruly pasta, dried lasagne sheets to be precise. 

I thought I was being clever by using up a half box of dried lasagne which I already had in the cupboard even though the recipe called for fresh sheets of lasagne (in order to roll it into the tube shape that cannelloni is known for).  Partly being frugal and partly being stubborn, I figured I could cook the dried sheets first and use them in the recipe just as easily as fresh sheets of lasagne. Having never cooked dried lasagne sheets before I thought it’d be easy-peasy (usually I just let the dried sheets cook from the liquid within a lasagne which always works well).  Boy oh boy, was I wrong. 

Unfortunately, I neglected to take photos of the hideous clump that came out of the pot, but believe me when I say it was not pretty.  I do not understand the physics of why individual pieces of dried lasagne would migrate to one another in a big pot of boiling water and magically fuse together, but this is basically what occurred.  

Luckily, I had another box to steal some spare sheets from and cook up (individually this time, ha!). I was able to finish making the dish even if it wasn’t quite picture perfect and even though my tubes were actually more like squashed parcels due to mutant dried lasagne sheets, it tasted OK.  

I have definitely learned a lesson for future dishes: dried lasagne to be used dry, and the next time that I’m itching to make cannelloni I will be using fresh lasagne for sure.  

Recipe: http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/1415655/tofu-and-spinach-cannelloni