Cannenoli Dream

Caution

Might make you hungry after reading...

My Cousin Sis (gotta think of a shorter name..) has very thoughtful friends. On her recent birthday they gave her a pasta machine and sign her up for a pasta making course.

 In Asia, this is more known as the pan mee machine. History did say Marco Polo learn to make pasta from China.  On one fine day, Cousin Sis decided to show us what she learned by making pasta from scratch. Name of dish was Cannenoli with Mushroom Sauce. There are 3 parts to this deceptively simple recipe.

To make pasta, you need the above ingredients and a very large surface if you are making for many people.

Essentially, you measure and put flour on the surface, dig a crater, pour eggs (beaten) and start mixing them in bit by bit with a fork. Do NOT be over ambitious and pour all the eggs in the crater or you might have the same disaster that we have - eggs flowing out of crater like a magma on a volcano eruption. If everything goes well, it will form a yellowish dough like the below. Rest for an hour (dough, not you. You should be doing sauce and filling during this period.)

After rest, just tear a small portion at a time and roll it flat enough to go into machine. Use some flour now and then so that it's not sticky. Put the flatten dough through the machine repeatedly, from thickest setting and gradually moving to the thinnest setting (no.2). The end result should be a flat out sheet that is so long, you need at least 2 pair of hands to hold it. We tried to sigma-tised it by jumping a few settings and the sheet was rough at certain patches. Morale of story, you can't rush perfection. You can tell your boss that if he ask you to sigma-tised something next time. 

Cut the sheets out into reasonable squares, slightly larger than 1/2 A4 size paper. Does that make sense? No? Then benchmark it against the lid of a standard size takeaway Tupperware. It's roughly the same size. Then cook them in hot water like any pasta. They cook very fast as they are freshly made, maybe around 30 seconds. Dry cooked sheets on a clean towel. Make sure they are not crumpled. They are now ready to be filled.

For filling, we used ricotta (evil thing), mashed potato and chopped steamed spinach, all cooked and cooled separately first. Mix them in to form a paste. You have to mix them cold.

Put filling into cooked sheets, roll them up and line them into a baking dish. They should look like oversize popiah.

Then pour mushroom sauce which consist of mushroom (duh), tomato puree, onion, garlic, and cream (very evil thing). Add sugar, pepper and salt to taste while cooking sauce.

After that pop entire dish into the oven for 15 minutes around 180 Celsius.

Yummy-licious!

It took 3 people and 3 hours to cook this dish and 5 people to clear the dish in 1/2 hour.