Chicken, Spinach and Ricotta Cannelloni with Walnuts and Asiago Cream Sauce Recipe
From time to time I do recipe development outside of this blog. A while back I was asked to come up with a recipe for stuffed pasta, and I quickly rose to the challenge since stuffed pasta would surely appear somewhere in my last meal on earth–probably next to a grilled medium-rare steak.
For the first several years I wrote this blog, I cooked the recipes of others’, something I always have found a bit of a trial. I have well over fifty cookbooks in my collections, but most of them have been purchased for inspiration, or for the photography. It has always annoyed me, to pull out a recipe only to discover I’m lacking one essential ingredient in my pantry, thus necessitating a trip to the grocery store. Sometimes recipes don’t work, even when I follow them perfectly from start to finish (as you should do if you expect them to work). I have also found that oftentimes many of the recipes in any given book are not to my taste. I wouldn’t say I’m a picky eater–I’ll eat almost anything–but I do have a particular palate. I think I’d make a bad food critic.
So for the last couple of years, I’ve been devising and posting many of my own recipes. I’ve been posting what I really like to eat, which has made for a bit of a skewed recipe bank, featuring a lot of shellfish, tarts, and pastas. Things need a bit of shaking up. We need some lamb shanks around here. Some fish–not just crustaceans. And maybe a chocolate cake or two. I’m working on it, I promise, but first here is my recipe for Chicken, Spinach, and Ricotta Cannelloni with Walnuts and Asiago Cream Sauce. If that sounds like a mouthful, it is–a mouthful of a heavenly blend of flavours and textures that sing, if I do say so myself.
This is food that is recognizable but a little different. Maybe not a bit of an edge but a least a wee bit of the unexpected, in the form of walnuts, which contrast perfectly with the chicken without stealing the thunder away from the spinach or cheese. And that is how I like to cook. Classic food with a bit of a twist. Something easy but not as easy as opening up a couple of cans and dumping them in a pot. My starting point with a recipe is always what do I like to eat and how I can I make it fresh? How can I create something people will make at home?
I’m a intuitive cook. I’ve been cooking since I was twelve. For many of those years I cooked badly. But I know know exactly how many pinches of salt I’ll need to bring a dish into balance. I know when to use one clove of garlic or two. And I’ve honed an instinct for what flavours go well together and which do not. They way a photographer can assess the light in a room and know how to set her camera, I know how much ground beef I’ll need to make meatballs to feed six people. Because cooking is like a dance, a series of steps, each one leading to another, each echoing a rhythm.
But cooking, like dancing, isn’t something that is easy for everyone. It takes time and patience and a lot of practice to get to the point where you’re not thinking about your feet. For me, it’s only really been about a year that my skills have come to feel more natural, where I can think about creating a recipe and know where to start. In this case, thinking about what ordinary goes into a cannelloni dish and how I can switch it up a bit, put my own spin on it.
I hope you’ll give this little dish a try. And if you do, let me know what you think.
Chicken, Spinach and Ricotta Cannelloni with Walnuts and Asiago Cream Sauce
Recipe Type: Pasta
Cuisine: Italian
Author: Darina Kopcok
Prep time: 45 mins
Cook time: 1 hour
Total time: 1 hour 45 mins
Serves: 6
Chicken , Spinach and Ricotta Cannelloni smothered in a tangy Asiago cream sauce.
- 28 oven-ready cannelloni shells
- 1 pound ground chicken
- 1 ½ cups ricotta cheese
- 6 cups fresh spinach
- 1 small onion, finely diced
- 2 large cloves garlic
- 3 tablespoons olive oil
- pinch nutmeg
- ¾ teaspoon salt
- ¼ teaspoon pepper
- 1 cup grated 4-cheese blend, divided
- ½ cup walnut pieces
- For the cream sauce:
- 2 cups whole milk
- 1 cup cream
- 3 tablespoons butter
- 3 tablespoons flour
- ½ teaspoons salt
- ¼ teaspoon pepper
- pinch nutmeg
- ¾ cups grated Asiago cheese
Preheat oven to 350F. In a large skillet, brown the ground chicken until cooked through; drain any water or extra fat. Add browned meat to a large mixing bowl and set aside.
In the same skillet, heat olive oil on medium high and sauté onion until golden brown. Add garlic to skillet and sauté for a minute. Add spinach and cook until wilted. Season with the salt and pepper and a pinch of nutmeg.
Add onions, garlic and spinach to bowl and allow to cool slightly before mixing ricotta through to incorporate. Mix through walnut pieces.
Make cream sauce by melting butter over medium low heat in a saucepan. Take off the heat; whisk in flour. Heat milk and cream in a separate saucepan or in the microwave; slowly whisk into butter and flour mixture. Raise heat to medium-high and bring to a light boil, whisking occasionally. Incorporate salt, pepper and Asiago cheese and set aside.
Pour 1/3 of the sauce on the bottom of a 9×9 casserole or oven-proof dish.
Stuff half the cannelloni shells using an icing bag or a spoon and place in two rows on the bottom of the casserole; cover with half the remaining sauce and half the 4-cheese blend. Repeat with the rest of the cannelloni, sauce, and 4-cheeses.
Cover with tin foil and place on a pan to catch any possible drips. Bake for 45 minutes; uncover and bake for a further 15 minutes, until cheese is golden brown and bubbling.
Let cannelloni cool for about 15 minutes before cutting into six sections and serving.
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