Playing with Food III - A funny shape

A tribute to Agnès Varda - Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse

A different type of beans

These are neither dried nor green beans - they are something in between! You should remove the beans from the shells and boil them for a considerably shorter period of time than you would dried beans. In particular, these should not be soaked. The result is a butter-smooth bean that makes an unbelievable soup. We would bet that Italians use these beans in their gastronomy as well - it is not hard to imagine a pasta al sugo di fagioli made with these little beauties. They are quite easy to spot during this time of the year in the markets, and are quite beautiful as well:

Returning with panacotta

After another (even longer) period of absence, here we are again to share a bit of what we eat. This absence has at least a very good excuse: we have recently relocated a few thousand miles away!

The dessert that we are going to share was part of the first dinner we held to thank people who helped us with the move. Although it was the first time we made it, it was surely a success - at least for us: who knows if our guests did not hate it?

So here it goes: panacotta with a plum sauce!



Ingredients:
-2 gelatine leaves
-400 ml of heavy cream
-50g of sugar plus a bit more
-vanilla essence
-4 plums
-white wine, preferably an aromatic one

Put the gelatine inside a bowl with a bit of cold water. It should soak for something like 10 minutes. Pour the cream into a small saucepan, whisk in the sugar and a few drops of vanilla essence and bring it slowly almost to the boil. Place the saucepan over a few ice cubes mixed with some cold water to cool the mixture a bit. Squeeze the gelatine leaves of any excess water and, in a clean bowl, gradually mix in a few teaspoons of the cream preparation. The idea is to completely dissolve the gelatine before mixing it in the saucepan. Pour the mixture into 4 ramekins, let them cool, cover with cling film and leave in the fridge for a few hours.

To prepare the sauce, bring the wine and a bit of sugar to the boil in a saucepan. Let most of the alcohol evaporate, but not all. Wash the plums, cut them into two halves, get rid of the stone, pat them dry, and place them in the saucepan. Bring the sauce to the boil again, turn off the heat, cover the pot and let the plums infuse the flavours. The skins of the plums will easily come off, discard them. Cool the sauce and put it in the fridge as well.

When ready to serve, run a sharp knife around the edge of the ramekins to facilitate the unmoulding. Place each ramekin in turn in a pan with hot water for a few seconds, turn it over the serving dish and sake vigorously. The panacotta should hopefully come out in one single piece... Decorate each dish with two plum halves, and pour over a bit of the sauce.

Playing with Food II

A tribute to Peter Greenaway - The Pillow Book

Homemade Pasta - Fettucine with Porcini

After many indecisions, we finally bought a pasta machine... Hurray! It's an Imperia, just like this one:

We are quite pleased with it so far: it is not the type of gadget that one is going to use everyday, but hopefully it won't be only gathering dust in the pantry.

Our first attempt at making pasta at home was successful. We thought about a sauce that would bring out the freshness of the pasta without overwhelming it, and came up with the idea of a porcini-based sauce using some milk. We made the sauce before tackling the pasta, just to get that out of the way.

Ingredients for the sauce:
- 40 g of dried porcini
- milk
- one small onion, finely chopped
- one garlic clove
- one bay leaf
- salt, pepper, nutmeg

Soak the mushrooms in a cup of boiling water for half an our. Heat some olive oil in a large saute pan. Press on the garlic clove with the side of a knife, and let it colour in the olive oil, along with the bay leaf. When the garlic is golden, add the onion. Let it fry gently without colouring. Squeeze as much water as possible from the soaked mushrooms, and coarsely chop them. Reserve the soaking liquid and strain it through a fine sieve. Add the mushrooms to the sautepan and let them fry for a few moments. Add the soaking liquid, let it get to the boiling point, reduce to low heat and slowly simmer until most of the liquid has evaporated. Season with salt, pepper, a bit of nutmeg. Add then about half a cup of milk, and reduce to a nice creamy sauce.

Ingredients for the fresh pasta:
-350 g of white bread machine flour
-2/3 eggs

We basically followed the instructions that came with the machine, but had to improvise a bit here and there. Various sources suggested different number of eggs for the same amount of flour. We decided to try to use as little egg as possible, and followed the instructions that came with the machine: 350g of flour and two (large) eggs. This was not enough, and a third egg was used. Below is a rough description of the whole process:

1. Pile the flour on a working surface and make a well in the middle. Put the eggs (2 initially) inside this well, and with a fork start incorporating them into the flour, sort of like making cement. The eggs should bind all the flour; if not, add another one. Knead the flour by pushing it away from you, on top of the surface, with the back of your wrists. If necessary, add a few drops of warm water. The final consistency should be plasticine-like, without sticking to your fingers. Make a ball with the dough, put it in a bowl, cover with a damp tea towel, and let it rest for half an hour.
2. Knead the dough a bit more, and cut it in 6 pieces. Cover the pieces of dough with a damp tea towel to avoid them drying up. Grab a bit of dough and pass it through the rolls, starting with the widest setting. Fold the sheet in two each time, and repeat 3-4 times. Gradually reduce the separation between the rolls, until you reach the thinnest setting. At this point, you should have a thin, long sheet that must dry for a bit before cutting. We hanged ours on a clothes drying rack:
3. Before starting the cutting process, the dough must not be too wet. If it is, it will jam the machine. It should not be too dry either, as it will just crack when in contact with the blades. Cut each of the sheets of dough in half lengthwise, and pass each one through the cutter. Hang the fettucine again on the racks, as they should dry a bit more before cooking.
4. Heat a large quantity of water in a big pot. Add salt. When it reaches the boiling point, add the fettucine. We did this in two batches. It takes literally a minute or two to cook the pasta, so be careful. Put the pasta directly in the sautepan containing the sauce, and add a bit of the cooking water to thin it. Fresh pasta seems to soak a lot of sauce, which on the one hand is good, but on the other can be a bit problematic, so the cooking water can be quite useful. Eat at once!

Spinach Risotto

We bought a beautiful cookbook called French, by Damien Pignolet, the idea being that this is one of the few cuisines about which we don't have a book. Needless to say, the recipes are very sophisticated --- and time-consuming, but we are very interested in experimenting with the ideas found in this excellent book.

We started with something not very complicated --- but hardly French. The author of the book argues that in certain regions of France, due to the geographical proximity, people do indeed traditionally cook pasta and riso, and hence he includes a chapter on these things.



I am not going to explain how to make a risotto here, and we followed the recipe very loosely. The interesting part of this dish is that we quickly boiled a whole bag of spinach, squeezed out as much water as possible from the leaves, and then pureed them. You are left with a very small amount of very deep-coloured green puree, that is added to the risotto during the final stage, when the riso is almost cooked and one just adds a bit of butter and grated parmesan --- the mantecare stage.

The result is very good and beautiful to look at. Very velvety...

Pappa al Pomodoro

Tomato soup is a quite popular lunch treat in England - at least the tinned variety is certainly very common! This has excited our curiosity about this dish, and for some time we kept our eyes peeled for interesting recipes for the real kind of tomato soup: the one that does not come out of a can. We have a Jamie Oliver book that features such a recipe, but for some reason we never felt really compelled to trying it out. To summarise, the whole thing has been in the back of our minds for some time.

One of these days I stepped into a Border's and as usually browsed through the wine/gourmet/cookery magazines. One in particular caught my attention: Saveur. It featured an article about Buffalo wings, a dish we had tried just a few days before, but also seemed to have several recipes/articles worthy of a more careful reading. I decided to buy it. Inside there was this interesting article about Florence trattorias, and with it came a recipe for a sort of tomato soup: pappa al pomodoro. It seems to be a very typical Tuscan dish, there are tons of recipes for this soup on the web. The one featured in the magazine is somewhat different from most we saw, and apparently it's this soup that is served at a trattoria called Coco Lezzone. We strongly recommend it! The recipe we are going to write down is the one we actually implemented, obviously a slight variation on what is described in the magazine...

Ingredients:

-4 tins of good-quality plum tomatoes
-2 leeks, white and pale green part only, washed and finely chopped
- a couple of slices of stale bread (the rougher the better)
-1 cube of organic chicken broth (sorry!)
-2 cloves of garlic, peeled and finely chopped
-olive oil, salt, pepper, basil leaves

In a Le Creuset-type pot, heat a few slugs of olive oil. When the oil is hot, add the garlic and let it sizzle until it loses the rawness. Next, add the leeks, turn the heat down and let them slowly sweat, stirring often. No rush, the slower the better. Once the leeks are nice and cooked, add the tomatoes. What I do is to make sure the rougher part of each tomato is discarded, and I sort of squeeze each tomato in my hand so that it goes into the pot almost as a paste. I used the seeds and the juice also. Dissolve the cube of organic chicken stock in 1/2 a liter of boiling water and add this stock to the pot. Turn the heat up to get to the boiling point, and then turn it down and let the soup simmer for a good 30-45 minutes until everything has fallen apart and looks like a very nice pasta sauce. Take the pot from the heat source and add the bread broken in small pieces, pushing it inside the soup. Wait for an extra 30 minutes or so, until the bread has absorbed all the moisture. At that point, whisk the soup vigorously until it looks like porridge. Season with salt and pepper, add the basil leaves finely chopped, perhaps a bit more oil, reheat gently and serve:

Beetroot and Chocolate Cake

Beetroot bunches are pretty nice to look at. We can't resist buying them, but we struggle to find interesting things to do with these things! We have recently acquired a taste for the leaves: wash them carefully and put them in a saucepan that has a tight-fitting lid. Add just a bit of water, half a glass or so, a slug of olive oil, a few rocks of salt, and put the pan with the lid on to sweat the leaves under high heat. Turn the leaves around a few times and make sure you don't overcook them. We find them a very nice treat, just with an added slug of olive oil and perhaps a few drops of balsamic vinegar. The texture is amazing, very chewy, and the taste quite intriguing.

The other success we've had is to use the beetroots themselves in a chocolate cake. There are quite a lot of recipes for this on the web, the one we use is inspired in all of them! It's hard to detect the presence of the beetroot in the final cake --- but it's there. There's this earthy aftertaste, reminiscent of clay, something hard to explain. The beetroot certainly prevents the cake from drying out, keeps it nice and moist. This is the kind of cake that improves quite a bit with keeping, somehow the beetroot's presence becomes more evident as time progresses.

Ingredients:

-75 g cocoa powder
-180 g all-purpose flour
-1 tsp baking powder
-250 g caster sugar
-250 g beetroot (cooked, say 3 small ones)
-3 large eggs
-200 ml of oil
-1 tsp vanilla extract

Trim the beetroots and wash them carefully. Do not peel them. Put them in a pressure cooker and boil for 10 minutes (after the whistle). Once the beetroot is warm enough to handle, the peel will come off quite easily. The colour is just astonishing! Using a food mill or a food processor, turn the beetroot into a puree (here's when you weigh the beetroot to make sure you have about 250g.) You can also mash them just using a fork, this way the cake will have more structure to it.

In a bowl, mix the beetroot puree with the oil, the vanilla extract, and the eggs. Add all the dry ingredients, mix everything very well, and tip this mixture into a baking tin that has been lined with baking paper. We used a square 20cm tin. Bake at 180 C for about an hour. It does not rise a lot.

Playing with food I

Buffalo Wings

In a quest to feel in our soul the sun that we cannot feel on our skin and bodies, we decided to try to replicate the chicken wings that we so many times enjoyed while we were living in the US. At this time of the year the weather is already quite warm in the area where we used to live --- most people are by now already pumping their AC full blast! I am afraid that's not quite the case in England...

Making fairly good chicken wings turned out to be quite easy and embarrassingly cheap. A kilogram of chicken wings is a bit more than a pound (of the sterling kind!), and the only other ingredients you need are Tabasco sauce and a chunk of butter! The other kick was a 4-pack of Sol, a Mexican beer that is heaven with spicy food. Simple pleasures...

Ingredients:
- 1 kg of chicken wings
- 25 g of butter
- 25 ml of Tabasco sauce (half a small bottle)
- salt and pepper to taste

Run the chicken wings under cold water, pick any obvious feathers, and joint them. The end bony bit is discarded. We froze these and will use them for stock. Pat the wings dry with paper towels, spread them on a roasting tin, season with salt and pepper, and roast on a very hot oven for about 30 minutes, turning them over once or twice. You want the wings to be fully cooked, but not dry, and crisp on the outside.

Once the wings are cooked, melt the butter in a saucepan and add to it the Tabasco sauce. Let it boil for a few seconds and thoroughly coat the wings with this mixture in a serving dish.

People usually have these wings with a blue cheese sauce and celery. We prefer to have them just with an ice-cold beer and maybe a few chunks of crunchy bread. Easy does it!

Mushroom Omelette

To cook an omelette comme il faut is not an easy task. I have never read much about the subject, and what I will describe is essentially the technique I arrived to after much trial and error. It also fits our personal taste, but there may be a better omelette out there, just waiting for us!

We recently bought a 20cm non-stick frying pan essentially to be used only when cooking eggs. It was expensive, but it is beautifully made and it seems to be a high quality addition to our kitchen. We think there isn't really the need for non-stick except for this purpose. If we manage to use it only for eggs, we expect that the pan will last for a long time and that we will be able to take plenty of pleasure from it.

This is how we presently make a 2-egg mushroom omelette:

Thickly slice a few mushrooms. Shitake are nice, but anything you have around is fine. We find that mushrooms are usually full of moisture, so we keep them outside the stupid plastic package they usually come in for a few days, on the kitchen counter, before using them.

Put a bit of olive oil or any other fat you fancy on your omelette pan. You can fry a small clove of garlic, thinly minced, in the oil if you like. The better the pan, the less fat you need. Once the oil is hot, add the mushrooms to the pan. Let them cook. There is really no rule here, it depends on the mushrooms. But try not to hurry, if it gets too hot take the pan out of the heat source and let the mushrooms release a bit of moisture. Add a few rocks of salt also --- but be gentle.

While this is taking place, lightly beat two eggs in a bowl with a bit of black pepper and some salt. Add some water to the eggs, just a bit. I find that water works better than milk or cream --- my taste. I recall reading somewhere that there are reasons to use the water and not milk. Also, wash and pat dry a few parsley leaves, which you then coarsely chop. Something like 2 tablespoons of parsley is about right.

When the mushrooms are ready, add the beaten eggs to the pan. Let this fry until the frying surface hardens. At that point, lift a bit of the edge of the omelette and tilt the pan so that uncooked egg that is on the top goes under the omelette. Do this around the whole perimeter of the omelette. The idea is to cook as much egg as possible before folding the omelette --- but not too much. You want the top still raw and creamy when you sprinkle the parsley on it. At that point, fold the omelette in half. Let it cook a bit more, and then place a plate on top of the pan and, with a quick move, turn the omelette onto the plate. This is done so that you can turn it and cook the other side a bit more.

The omelette should have an appetizing golden exterior and a fluffy, wet and creamy interior. Practice is the key. I am still working towards perfection!

On using leftovers

Maintaining a blog requires a lot of discipline --- we are just beginning to understand that. Between the last post and today, we cooked and enjoyed several interesting meals, but clearly did not have the stamina to report back. We'll try to get back on track!

For Easter Sunday's lunch, we roasted a duck in the oven. It was quite good. After one or two meals of re-heated duck, you had your share. So what we did was to pick over the carcass for leftover meat that we then put in the freezer for a later meal.

With the carcass itself we decided to make some stock: break the bones in smaller pieces, peel an onion or two, one turnip, a few carrots, a couple of peppercorns, a bay leave, put everything inside a Le Creuset casselore and barely cover with cold water. Any roast leftovers are welcome to the pot. Bring it to a hard boil, skim the surface, and then simmer at the lowest temperature for as long as you can - 2-3 hours or more. Strain the liquid through a colander and let it cool. Discard all bones and cooked vegetables. When cold, put it in the fridge to solidify. After it's solid, one can remover as much fat as one wishes from the top.

The original idea was to freeze this stock, which we could then use to make risotto or whatever asked for chicken stock.

We ended up making a very nice soup: bring the stock to a hard boil and check for seasoning and concentration. We added more water and also duck fat that we salvaged from the roast. Then, peel a few carrots and turnips, cut them into bit-sized chunks and drop them in the stock. Grab a Savoy cabbage and cut it in large strips. Into the pot it goes. Let simmer until the vegetables are tender and, at the last moment, add a couple of handfuls of some small pasta, like elbows or conchiglette. Let the pasta cook and it's done. Amazingly good and comforting. No pictures, though...

Green beans soup

Soup is a quintessential dish of where we come from. The process of making it is essentially always the same: one starts by boiling some vegetables or legumes, which are then pureed to form a broth, the basis of the soup. This puree is thinned down with water to reach the right consistency, and this is heated back to the boiling point. Some vegetables are then cooked in this broth - cabbage, spinach, whatever.

Green beans soup is a summer thing. You can have it even cold after the beach, it is delicious like that. Tomatoes are often used in making the broth, which gives it a nice acidity that makes the soup palatable when cold.

Alas, summer is still a long way to come where we are living right now. If we close our eyes and concentrate on the smell, maybe we can dream of a hot summer night!

Ingredients:
250 gr of green beans
4 medium potatoes
2 turnips
2 carrot
1 onion
1 garlic clove
2 small tomatoes, tinned ones are fine
olive oil
coarse salt

Peel all the vegetables except the green beans, chop them in small chunks (save for one of the carrots) and put them in a pressure cooker. Cover with water, add a few slugs of olive oil, close the lid, and switch off 10 minutes or so after the cooker has reached full pressure. Release the pressure by running cold water over the pot and, after removing the safety valve, open the cooker. With the aid of a blender, reduce the cooked vegetables to a creamy puree. Make sure everything is really smooth before moving on to the next stage. In the meanwhile, cut the other carrot in half lenghtwise, and then chop it in thin slices crosswise. Cut the extremities of the green beans and slice them at an angle to obtain 1cm stipes. Add water (preferably hot) to the puree in order to reach the consistency of a creamy broth, a bit more of olive oil, and salt to taste. When the broth comes back to the boil, drop the green beans and carrot in the pot. Simmer gently until everything is cooked but retains the shape and bite.

A night of Cod, Potatoes, and Port

As if there weren't any food blogs around, here's yet another one!

This is our Saturday night dinner. We decided to use some of the salt cod we keep in the fridge for a special ocasion, thought about a dish to cook, and bought the wine accordingly. The wine was a Chilean Chardonnay, a 2004 Montes Alpha, which was particularly well-suited for the dish we had in mind - cod cooked in the oven with a creamy Bechamel sauce. At the last minute, we decided to change the dish, but did not change the wine, so the pairing wasn't exactly perfect.

The other aspect of our Saturday night was Port. The night before, we opened a bottle of a 10 year old tawny, Warre's Otima, and started talking about the differences between the various types of Port. Saturday afternoon, while drinking a pint at the local pub, the idea came back to us, and we decided to buy an LBV and put the two wines in confrontation. Our choice was 1999 Noval Unfiltered LBV. Can you tell which one is which?



Here is the recipe and a picture of the final dish:

Cod and New Potatoes in the Oven

This is a poor man's version of a classic: Bacalhau 'a Lagareiro. Not exactly the same, it is good enough!

Ingredients:
200 gr of salt cod
500 gr of new potatoes
coarse salt, garlic, parlsey and olive oil.

Soak the cod at least overnight, changing the water frequently.

Set the oven at 200 centrigrades. Put the cod in a large pot, and cover it with boiling water. Put the lid on and leave it like this for half an hour. Note that the pot should not be on the stove. Wash the potatoes, pat them dry, put them on a tray, sprinkle them with salt and olive oil, and put the tray in the hot oven. In the meanwhile, mince a few cloves of garlic and put it in a small ramekin with olive oil. When the potatoes are almost done, take the tray out of the oven, punch each of the potatoes so that its skin breaks, pour the garlic-olive oil mixture over the potatoes and move everything around to coat evenly. Find room in the tray for the chunks of cod, which you have patted dry, and return the tray to the oven to brown. It's a good idea to pour a bit more olive oil over the cod. Chop the parsley finely and sprinkle the finished dish with it. It's ready to eat with more olive oil on the side!