Canneloni - The Pasta Tube

Welcome to the new year everyone.  I hope we all had a wonderful festive season.  I actually prepped this blog back in October, but November and December completely flew by us, and I never got around to posting it.

Back in 2004 when I began studying as a chef, my first big kitchen tool that I bought myself was a pasta roller.  I've always found homemade pasta very elegant, even though kneading the dough can be difficult.  My pasta roller has probably only been used 5 times or so.  When I bough it, I never considered that the counter in the kitchen would make it impossible to mount.  Ideally one needs a kitchen island to mount it, as counters with doors beneath prevents the roller from being mounted.

Of course with all the hopping around between jobs, then homes and jobs after moving down to Cape Town, there was never a kitchen where I could mount the machine.  Until now.  A few weeks ago, a friend and I got on the topic of pasta.  He mentioned he would love to buy himself a pasta roller, and during the course of our chatting, my roller came out of the cupboard.  For the first time in the 3 years we've been living in our current house, I realised I could mount the roller in our kitchen, hence I had to make a batch of cannelloni.  And I decided to make it the Sunday after Halloween:
 

We've had these individual lasagna bowls for a good couple of months, but with the diet we are on, (and thinking I'd have to roll the pasta by hand if I ever wanted to make lasagna), we've never used them.  As you can see, 4 rolls fit perfectly in a dish, but next time I want to rotate them 90 degrees and only place 3 tubes in a dish, as 4 was too much.  We really struggled to get through the dish, but after a hard night of Halloween, and spending the Sunday morning cleaning the house, I figured we deserved a break.