Menu A v Menu B

Today was a bit of a Red Letter Day for me as I cooked something new and 4 out of 5 people liked it!!! You probably have to live here to understand what an emotional moment that was...
It all started out as though it was going to be quite an ordinary sort of day...scurried around tidying up a bit for Nina, the children's French teacher...although have to say we have been in a kind of Amber Alert sort of state since she turned up a week early and our sitting room was scarily shambolic and had to be tidied up in the length of time it took for Nina to get from our gate to our front door...awful...

BAD cannelloni

GOOD cannelloni

Anyway we did some french practise with the children, they had their lesson and we got started on lunch - cannelloni! I have never actually had cannelloni before but knew that I liked it...spinach, tofu, garlic, pasta...what's not to like? And also I had finally found urrg-free cannelloni (I could only find it made with uggs when I was shopping online but found it on the shelf when I went to the shop) so wanted to give it a go.
The recipe was one from Veg Web but I changed it a bit as thought it was a strange idea to puree tofu and spinach together for the filling so I just broke up the tofu with a fork and stirred through the spinach (I LOVE spinach) and garlic (doubled, natch) and yeastflakes. I couldn't put the quarter of a cup from the recipe as I'm very mean with yeastflakes in cooking because we like them so much on toast that I begrudge using them for anything else where they tend to just disappear anyway without really changing the flavour. But I used them in this case because apart from salt and pepper and garlic the tofu didn't have any seasoning.
The tomato sauce bit in the recipe was some jar of tomato casserole (?) sauce that I hadn't heard of, but I think 'store-bought' (thank you Laura Ingalls Wilder!) tomato sauce can come a bit sweet so prefer homemade. So we made an enchilada sauce and used that - we watered it down a bit to make sure there was enough as I wasn't cooking the cannelloni first.
The recipe instructed to use a ziplock bag with a hole cut in the corner but  I have NEVER got on well with any sort of piping (I always decorate my children's birthday cakes with 10ml syringes that our lovely vet Josh Lida gives us for the purpose!) so I shoved the filling in the cannelloni with my fingers and then poured the sauce over it all, covered it and baked it.

About half way through I took its lid off and sprinkled it with grated Cheezly and let it finish cooking uncovered.
We then had a bit of a family 'meeting' (meltdown) because I already knew that Pony wasn't going to eat it (although she always tries everything new, bless her) so was doing oven chips (I absolutely loathe these and feel a complete failure when I give them to my children but needs must...). But then Fin told me he was going to want chips as well as cannelloni..
What this usually means is that the Menu B option is plonked on to the plate beside Option A and some godforsaken dish like potato waffles or oven chips gets eaten first until Fin/Pony/Mouse is full and the proper meal is cold and so gets wasted...sigh
Anyway we brokered a deal in the end whereby Fin could have both but had to have the cannelloni first and fill up on (horrible) oven chips when he had given the cannelloni a fair go...in fact, to my delirious happiness he loved the cannelloni so much he had two helpings of cannelloni and was then too full to eat more than a handful of oven chips! I WON! I BEAT OVEN CHIPS! HOORAY FOR HOMECOOKING!!

PS. Mouse also ate two helpings which was unexpected and Pony didn't like it which was NOT unexpected..!