Weekend Cooking: Open Cannelloni with Pork Meatballs

We love a good lasagne in this house, but unless you buy a pre-prepared one, it is a bit of work so it is more a weekend kind of meal, with plenty of leftovers for during the week. Making it from scratch, there's the making the meat sauce, and the white sauce and layering it up and cooking it. It is something that I do semi-regularly using a lower fat recipe which is quite tasty but I have also tried a couple of different recipes for making during the week. One was a slow cooker lasagne which I don't think we need to say much more about because it was truly awful. This recipe, whilst not technically lasagne, is a fair substitute and doesn't take too much time or effort to prepare.

The recipe once again comes from an issue of Diabetic Living, but this time is from a celebrity chef by the name of Michael Moore. Now, to be fair, I don't remember hearing about Michael Moore before, but there was a bonus lift out in the March/April issue. There weren't a lot of recipes that I could try because he used a lot of almond meal in his recipes which don't work with our allergy issues but I was impressed with how simple this seemed and then when I had made it, with how tasty it is.

I would say to make sure that you spread your sauce enough to ensure that the lasagne sheets all have sauce on them otherwise you end up with some crunchy bits. Unless you like crunchy bits of course!

No idea why there is so much talk about lasagne in this post when it really isn't a post about lasagne at all!

Open Cannelloni with Pork Meatballs
Serves 6


485g lean pork mince
1 clove garlic, crushed
1/2 small red onion, finely chopped
1 tspn crushed black peppercorns
Sea salt
1 egg white
Cooking spray
300ml bottled Napolitana pasta sauce
350g fresh egg lasagne sheets
60g grated parmesan

1. Preheat oven to 180C. Mix mince with garlic, onion, black pepper, salt and egg white in a bowl. Dip your hands in cold water. Roll mixture into 14 even meatballs and set aside.

2. Grease a large baking dish and spoon a little Napolitana sauce over the base

3. Trim lasagne sheets into squares and place a meatball into the centre of each one. Place into baking dish; repeat with remaining lasagne and meatballs.

4. Pour over remaining Napolitana sauce to cover and sprinkle with parmesan. Bake in over for 45-50 minutes.

In other news, I had to make chocolate cake this week (yes, had to) but wanted to do something a bit different than just ice it. I made my standard chocolate cake, but rather than using icing I bought a couple of tubs of low fat chocolate mousse from the supermarket and stirred it until it was smooth and then used that as icing! Sprinkle with a crushed up Flake or grated chocolate and voila.

Have to say, I will definitely be doing that again. Easy and very tasty!!

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