Baked Meat Cannelloni - Cannelloni di Carne al Forno

Directions

1. Chop the Prosciutto finely and set aside.
2. In a wide pan, over medium heat, add the 5 tablespoons of olive oil. Start by adding the crumbled sausage meat, stir well and let start gett some colour. Add the veal a bit at a time and stir. let start to brown. Then add the pork, a little at a time and continue browning. Finally add the chicken. The procedure is a little slow because you want to brown the meat and if you put all the meat in one go it starts to loose it's water and you end up with boiled rubbery meat instead of fryied meat.
3. Keep stirring the meat until golden brown all through, add the white wine, stir, let the alcohol evaporate, season with salt, freshly ground pepper and some nutmeg. Put the meat in a colander over a bowl and allow to cool. All the excess fat and liquid will fall through the colander.
4. When cool, put the fryied meat in a bowl, add the chopped prosciutto, the egg lightly beaten and the parmesan cheese. Mix everything very well to blend all the ingredients.
5. For the Becahmel Sauce: Warm up the milk.
6. In a medium saucepan, melt the cut up butter until it starts to get a little blond. Add the flour all at once and stir continuously over low heat until well blended.
7. Slowly add the warm milk, stirring constantly (I actually prefer to use a whisk, I think it helps blending better). When it's all incorporated, continue cooking for 15 minutes over low heat. You need to cook the bechamel sauce for this amount of time to cook the flour and minimize the taste of raw flour.
8. Season with salt, freshly ground white pepper, a nice dash of freshly grated nutmeg and let cool. The bechamel should remain soft, not thick.
9. For the Tomato sauce: In a pan over medium heat add 5 tablespoons of olive oil, the 2 chopped garlics and the onion chopped very finely. Stir until the onion is translucent, Add the passata, stir, add a pinch of salt and reduce the heat to low. Allow to simmer for about 15 to 20 minutes until you have a thick tomato sauce.
10. For the cannelloni (see note at the bottom if you have dry pasta cannellonis): Bring a large pot of salted water to boil and add 1 tablespoon of olive oil. On the side have a big bowl of cold salted water with 1 tablespoon of olive oil.
11. Prepare on your your work surface 2 clean kitchen tea towels (linen or cotton - not terry cloth) to drain the cooked lasagna sheets.
12. Add 2 or 3 pasta sheets a time and cook about 2 minutes.Remove each lasagne square out with a slotted spoon and dip it in a bowl with salted cold water. When cold, drain and set them on the clean kitchen tea towel, making sure they don’t overlap so they don’t stick to each other.
13. Preheat oven to 350°F with rack in the middle. Prepare a 13- by 9- by 2-inch ceramic baking dish.
14. Divide the meat filling on the lasagna rectangles in a line on the short side of the pasta rectangle, then roll up to close filling.
15. Add half the bechamel sauce to the tomato sauce and stir well to mix.
16. Cover the bottom of the baking dish with a good layer of tomato bechamel mixture.Align the rolled cannelloni's, seam side down, to baking dish, starting.on one of the ends. Finish putting all the cannellonis in the dish and cover completely with the tomato bechamel sauce.
17. Sprinkle generously with parmesan on top, and finish with a few tablespoons of the remainder bechamel over the tomato sauce.
18. Bake in the oven for 30 minutes. Turn off the oven, half open the door and leave the cannellonis to rest and the sauce will thicken a little.
19. Serve hot.
20. Note: in Italy people use cannellonis which are large tubes of dry pasta. Because there is a lot of sauce you don't have to pre-cook them and they also absorb some liquid from the tomato sauce, which is why you need this much tomato sauce. I don't know if in the U.S you can find these large pasta tubes. If you can, use them by all means, it's much easier then making them out of lasagna. You just fill them with a small spoon or preferably with a piping bag, until the whole tube is filled with meat, then put them on the tomato sauce, cover with tomato sauce, some bechamel and bake for 30 minutes.
21. Tomato Passata: In Italy we have 2 different kinds of tomato sauce - one is Passata and the other is Pomarola. The Passata is fresh tomatoes, peeled and passed through a vegetable mill so you have in fact raw tomato juice. You can make it by processing canned peeled tomatoes with the liquid that comes in the tin - as easy as that! The Pomarola, or tomato sauce, is made with passata as a base, but is cooked with olive oil, onions, garlic, bay leaf, thyme, basil and sometimes some celery, salt and pepper. It is then cooked for about 45 minutes to reduce and obtain a thicker sauce that is already finished.