Last weekend, my sister and I went to my favorite neighborhood restaurant, Dinette, where the special of the day was chicken cannelloni. We don’t eat chicken so we didn’t order it, but everyone else in the place did. Every time we looked up, skillets of bubbling cannelloni were being brought out to the other tables. We contented ourselves with a meal of toast topped with herb frittata, ricotta gnocchi with delicata squash and leeks, and house pickled sardines with fennel and radishes - all of which was delicious - but, still, I couldn’t get the image of that cannelloni out of my head; I started craving cannelloni in the worst way. Finally, tonight, I decided that I just had to make it!

Cannelloni are pasta sheets that are rolled around a filling and then baked in a sauce, typically tomato sauce. The result is similar to lasagna except that the pasta is rolled rather than layered. Like lasagna, you can pretty much fill cannelloni with anything. I wanted to do something really special with my cannelloni so I decided to try making my own homemade ricotta and use that as the filling. It turns out that making ricotta at home is laughably simple. The toughest part is lugging a gallon of milk home from the store. I followed this recipe from 101 Cookbooks. You simply heat whole milk and buttermilk together in a pot until the curds separate from the whey. Then, you transfer everything to a colander lined with cheesecloth, hang the cheesecloth, and then let the ricotta drain until it stops dripping. That’s it! It couldn’t be easier, and this ricotta is infinitely better than the stuff you get in tubs at the supermarket.

I flavored my homemade ricotta with minced parsley, nutmeg, grated parmesan cheese, and salt and pepper. To make the cannelloni, I made a small batch of pasta dough and ran it through my pasta machine on the thinnest setting. I cut the pasta sheets into rectangles and then cooked them in boiling water until they were almost done. Then, I rolled the pasta around generous helpings of the ricotta, topped the whole thing with a very simple tomato sauce, and baked it, covered, in a 350 degree oven for about 30 minutes. To drink, I served a Dolcetto d’Alba from Poderi Elia. Dolcetto is an Italian wine that is similar to a full-bodied Pinot Noir.

The meal was great and certainly satisfied my cannelloni craving. And, with today’s heavy rain and wind, it was a perfect evening for hot, cheesy cannelloni. I can’t decide which wins for most comforting dish of the weekend: the French onion soup I had at Presse last night in the middle of that awesome blizzard or tonight’s cannelloni. The snowstorm is pretty hard to beat, but I think I need to give the edge to my cannelloni with homemade ricotta, if only because it was such a labor of love. Hooray for winter cuisine!