This weekend I made mushroom and spinach cannelloni. I actually did.

I picked the cannelloni partly because I’m currently a pescetarian (after we visited a farm on Easter and the little piglets looked up at me with their little snouts and little eyes that pleaded “let us live!”… I’m hoping it’s just a phase though.) but mostly because I kept seeing cannelloni tubes at the supermarket and, never having known such things existed before, was intrigued. The recipe was from the Mary Berry and Lucy Young book Cook up a Feast.

My fist hurdle came when preparing the ingredients. I innocently went to get the called for can of tomatoes but when I opened the cupboard door something threw itself off the shelf at high speed only to break it’s fall in the casserole dish, which naturally shattered. Great. What on earth am I supposed to cook the cannelloni in now? And if that weren’t enough, at that moment, as if inspired, an opened bag of spaghetti followed suit and emptied its contents everywhere. Absolutely everywhere. I’ll be honest, I didn’t take it well, I may have even in the heat of the moment used an expletive. Internally I rounded on my boyfriend, Conor. It never would have happened, I raged to myself, if someone hadn’t overstuffed the cupboard, if someone knew how to organize things, if someone hadn’t just shoved everything up there when they unpacked the shopping last time… And then it hit me. That someone was me. I overstuffed the cupboard, I don’t know how to organize things, and I had unpacked the shopping last time. Sorry Conor.

My next hurdle: mushrooms. The recipe calls for 500g of mixed mushrooms roughly chopped. 500g is a lot of mushrooms. More than a lot. It’s loads. Conor and I have an ongoing debate on how to clean mushrooms (we also talk about interesting things). I was taught, although admittedly I can’t remember by whom, that you should dab mushrooms with a wet paper towel, or cloth or whatever, so that the mushroom doesn’t absorb too much water. Conor insists this is rubbish and that you can just rinse them. So here it was, Sunday afternoon, and I was righteously giving each mushroom a tender loving sponge bath. I had got through perhaps ten when I thought to myself “I’m doing pretty well here!” and checked the pile of mushrooms to admire the hefty dent I felt sure I was making in it. My pile was still 500g of mushroom strong… minus ten. This was going to take ages. So very calmly I made sure that Conor was not only out of the room, but in a far away enough room that I’d have time to hide the evidence should he start heading towards the kitchen, and I started grabbing mushrooms by the handful – chestnut, shiitake, button alike – and shoving them under the tap. Water absorption… really? They were fine.

So. 500g of mushrooms now washed. 500g of mushrooms now to chop. I won’t bore you with the details, suffice to say it took half an hour.

Now to actually make the cannelloni. The first step is to fry the mushrooms with the spinach in a frying pan. It crossed my mind, while trying to fit the mushrooms and spinach into a British size frying pan, that either Mary Berry and Lucy Young have never actually seen 500g of roughly chopped mushrooms and 225g of roughly chopped spinach, or they have access king sized frying pans. Whichever it was, 725g of food does not fit into my frying pans. I somewhat lost my cool as my carefully washed and roughy chopped to perfection mushrooms cascaded to the floor and periodically flew across the room. Enter my boyfriend. Calm in the face of crisis (and always confused by my freak outs in the kitchen) suggested I cook them in batches. It took some serious explanations, and eventually a physical demonstration for me to understand how he intended me to do this, but admittedly it was a good idea.

The rest was pretty easy. For those with patience, dedication to mushrooms, and giant frying pans, this recipe isn’t too complicated. I found a smaller casserole dish to cook it in and was relieved to see the cannelloni tubes were actually much smaller than I had imagined and would fit into it- although that did make spooning in the eventually fried mushroom and spinach mix a bit fiddly.

It came out of the oven looking amazing, and, to my delight, potentially edible. Admittedly the presentation went to pot as I spooned it out onto the plates, but I am very proud to say that it was not only edible, but was actually quite tasty.

In the future, if I make it again I will: buy pre chopped mushrooms, rinse them from the start (only when Conor isn’t paying attention), get bigger frying pans, and cook the mushrooms for longer (not all of them were fried enough and were a bit tough after being baked in the oven).

Not bad for a first timer, right?

Here’s the recipe: