Cannelloni with Minced Meat and Mushrooms / Cannelloni met gehakt en paddestoelen

This was really delicious! It's been quite a while since I've been wowed like this by a dish I made for the first time (well, it's been quite a while since I've regularly made dishes for the first time anyway, but let's ignore that detail for a minute). Actually, we have this unwritten rule that a dish needs to be good enough to be served to guests to receive a 5 star rating, and this dish does not fulfill that requirement as it's too much comfort food - but omit the crème fraîche in the tomato sauce (though not the filling), and I think you're there already.

I changed a few smallish things: I added a finely chopped carrot and celery stick to up the vegetable content; I swapped the red wine for stock, and I used 2 instead of 1 tbsp of tomato concentrate, a few leaves of fresh sage instead of dried, and 500 g instead of 400 g of minced meat.

I chose not to purée the filling as I found that idea ridiculous (purée minced meat? come on!), but then proceeded to chop the mushrooms finely, which was tedious, and when it was time to fill the cannelloni, I finally realized why puréeing, or at least pulsing the filling might not have been such a bad idea after all. I made only one half of cannelloni today, I might pulse the rest of the filling before stuffing the other half of the cannelloni tomorrow.

If you do decide to omit the crème fraîche, it's probably a good idea to add extra cheese, ie. mozzarella.

Edited somewhat later: Pulsing actually didn't help at all! Well, ok, it might spare you the chore of finely chopping the mushrooms, but it didn't help with filling the cannelloni! That worked best by holding one vertically in the baking dish, adding the filling with a teaspoon and lightly tapping the cannelloni once in a while so that the filling sinks down until the cannelloni is full.

Edited 10 October 2016: This time I used the kitchen machine to chop the mushrooms - and I definitely did not like the results, as the mushrooms came out as a purée (which was, I guess, totally foreseeable - but that's also the reason why I use my kitchen machine so rarely...).

As the last time, I made two portions to finish on two different days. I decided to purée one of them, properly, in my MagiMix (and not the silly small handheld thing I used last time for pulsing) - even puréed, I wasn't able to fill the cannelloni easily, so for the second portion, I decided I'd simply smash the cannelloni and just layer the pasta with the meat. I don't think I'll ever use cannelloni again (at least not for this recipe) - I might actually use lasagna sheets instead. The first version with the puréed meat sauce also had the unfortunate side effect of drying out faster than it should.