Mushroom & Pesto Cannelloni

This sounds like a dish that had a lot of time and thought put into it, doesn't it?  Cannelloni.  It summons up visions of Italian mamas cooking tomato sauces from scratch, and patiently stuffing those fiddly tubes of pasta with complicated yet fabulous fillings.  But I can't lie to you, readers.  This dish took under an hour to make and required minimal effort from my poor, tired, mid-week self. Yay!

We happened to have some cannelloni tubes rattling round in the cupboard (and when I say rattling, I really mean it.  They had long ago set themselves free from their cardboard packet and were just rolling merrily around the bottom of our big pasta storage box. But dried pasta never spoils, right?  Right!) We also had some leftover pesto (yep, still hanging around from this meal), and a tub of ready-made, supermarket tomato sauce that we'd intended to eat with this, before the never-ending pesto took over our lives.  All these things needed eating.  So at the supermarket I bought a couple of cheap pallets of mushrooms, and set about making a mushroom and pesto cannelloni.  B was openly sceptical.

Firstly, I sliced the mushrooms and let them soften in olive oil for about ten minutes, until squidgy and more pliable.  Pliable is important in cannelloni making!  Then I tipped in the pesto and gave everything a good stir until all the mushrooms were covered with greeniness.  Next, I got out a Pyrex baking dish and covered the bottom with a thin layer of tomato sauce.  Then, out came the frankly battered-looking cannelloni tubes.  I stuffed these (carelessly, because really, who has time to be neat) with the pesto-y mushrooms - a fork works best.  The tubes then nestled into the baking dish, the leftover mushrooms got scattered over, and then everything was topped with the rest of the tomato sauce.  It then went into the oven for 35 minutes.

It came out looking like this.  All of B's scepticism miraculously disappeared. 

It's not really suitable for a dinner party, I will grant you.  The mushrooms turn pretty black in the oven, and the badly-stuffed tubes fell apart. But it tasted amaaaazing. The combination of garlicky mushrooms, pasta, and rich tomato sauce was a real winner.  We hoovered it up whilst lounging on the sofa in our tartan pyjamas.  And it's perfect for that.