Pork Cannelloni

I would like to apologise for the terrible photo. It is really difficult to get a good shot at food with pasta sauce and baked cheese, everything always look like a mess no matter from which angle.

With that said, I always thought that it is not very common to use pork in pasta dishes. But I had a pack of minced pork bought the day before, as I was planning to make something else. However, I couldn't get the main ingredient so the pork ended up in here.

Since I couldn't find the frozen lasagna sheets, I thought using the hard ones might do. I just need to soak it in slightly salted hot water to soften it. But somehow, that didn't work very well, and the lasagna sheets were a little too chewy. Luckily, they were still edible and not that bad. The following is made up of bits and pieces of instructions I had read up on different cannelloni recipes.

Pork Cannelloni

2 servings

Ingredients :

- 4 (17cm x 12cm) lasagna sheets
- 1 cup minced pork
- 1 tablespoon bread crumbs
- 1 egg
- 1 medium onion, chopped
- 4 cloves garlic, minced
- 3 tablespoons of stock
- 1 bottle 575g pasta sauce (I used less than that amount)
- Shredded Parmesan cheese
- Shredded Mozarella cheese
- salt and pepper to taste

Directions :

To make the pork filling,

1) Brown the chopped onion and garlic in olive oil and add the meat, spreading it out well across the frying pan so that it cooks evenly.

2) Season with salt and pepper. Add in the stock, cover and leave to cook over a low heat until the stock has evaporated. Turn off the heat and add the bread crumbs, mix in with the meat, and leave to cool. When the meat is cooled, add in the egg. Mix well.

Note : As the stock and the pasta sauce are already salted, I would suggest to just add a tiny amount of salt at this stage. Or maybe not add any at all. It all depends on how salty you like your pasta to be.

To assemble the cannelloni,

1) Preheat the oven to 190 degrees Celsius.

2) Spread the some pasta sauce over the the baking dish.

3) Taking a lasagna sheet, spoon the desired amount of meat at one end of the sheet. Roll up the sheet around the meat and place the seam side down over the tomato sauce in the baking dish. Repeat with the other lasagna sheets and the rest of the pork.

4) Cover the cannelloni with the rest of the pasta sauce and sprinkle with Parmesan and Mozarella, before placing a sheet of aluminium foil over the top and placing in the oven.

5) After 10 minutes, remove the aluminium foil and leave to cook for another 20 minutes, or until the cheese begins to brown.

Note : For my case, the cheese browns in less than 20 minutes.