In which there is GARLIC

You know when you leave something for a while and intend to come back really soon and then it's Reading Week and you go out of town and then it's finals time and you're busy with marking and exams and then when you finally get back to it it's been four months and it's May already? Yeah. That happened to me one time, too.

ANYWAYS enough about me. Let's have some food.

I swear one time I had this recipe for some kind of Italian bread stew but I looked for it tonight, because that's what I felt like eating, and all I could find were recipes for Italian bread SALAD or Italian bread SOUP and I didn't want either of those. So I just wung it. (Wung is the past tense of wing, in case you didn't know.) Actually, I'm kind of in the process of winging it right now, so if you ever see this, it means I was successful. If not, then I guess you're not reading this right now. Who knows, maybe after four months no one is reading it anyways!

If you feel like eating my made-up recipe for Italian bread STEW, then you need the following:

3 cups of cubed stale bread
1 large tin of diced tomatoes
1.5 c cooked white beans
1 diced onion
1-5 cloves of garlic, minced (I used 5 because I'm on Team Buffy)
[Optional: some diced prosciutto, which I used because it was in my freezer and I felt like it]
1 diced carrot
two bay leaves
fresh or dried basil to taste. I added about 3 TBS fresh chopped that I had frozen from the summer!
a sprig of fresh rosemary or a bit of dried rosemary
olive oil
garlic salt (if you are so inclined)
salt and pepper
some lovely minced parsley

1. Start by heating a glug of olive oil in a deep-ish pan. Sautee your onions and your prosciutto, if you're using it. Then add the garlic and cook until it's fragrant.

2. Add the rest of the ingredients (down to where it says olive oil) and cover and cook for 10 more minutes on medium and then on low for another 30 minutes.

3. In the last 10 minutes, heat some more olive oil in another pan. Toast the breadcrumbs in the olive oil, tossing with garlic salt to taste. GARLIC! I would recommend watching the breadcrumbs closely as some of mine got a bit overly toasted and had to be eaten before their time.

4. Taste the stew for seasonings and adjust if you need to. When your breadcrumbs are all toasty and garlicky,  serve the stew in bowls and top with a heap of breadcrumbs! And parsley! You could even sprinkle some parmesan cheese on there if you were really feeling decadent!



VERDICT: DELICIOUS. Hence my posting of it here.

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Traditional Lasagna

I can't believe it's this late in the season and I only just made lasagna last week.

This is a recipe that I kind of cobbled together. The meat sauce is based on Emeril's Turkey Bolognese recipe, but I tweaked it. The bechamel is just a bechamel but I didn't used to make lasagna this way - I was formerly in the ricotta-mozzarella camp. I didn't used to like nutmeg in my savoury dishes but making Pastitsio converted me.

This recipe makes enough for 8 people to have one serving, so if you want leftovers it's good for 4 or 6. It's nice with a salad, I think. Our guests brought a lovely spinach, tomato, and boccincini salad, and we had home-made bread on the side.

So here is how you do it:

First, you make the meat sauce. You need:

1 tbs olive oil
1 large diced onion
3 finely diced carrots
2 lbs of ground meat; I used a combination of beef, veal, and pork because I am decadent, but turkey, beef, and/or chicken are great too.
2 cloves of garlic, finely minced
1 small tin of tomato paste
1/2 c dry vermouth or 3/4 c white wine
2 c chicken stock
1/2 c heavy cream
1/4 c parsley
1/4 c fresh basil, chopped or 2 tsp dried

1. Saute the meat in the oil over medium-high until it's not quite brown and broken up.

2. Add the onions and carrots and cook until the onions are soft. Add the garlic and cook until fragrant.

3. Add the vermouth and let it cook off a little, then add the tomato paste and stock. Let this all simmer for a while.

4. Then add the parsley, basil, and cream. Let this simmer away until the sauce is thickened and creamy. Adjust the seasonings if you need to. Set the pan aside and preheat your oven to 350º.


If you are using noodles that you need to boil first, do this. I use oven-ready ones, so there. Lightly grease a lasagna pan and set it ready. Now it's time to make the bechamel sauce.

You need:

4 tbs butter
4 tbs flour
2 c milk
1 tsp nutmeg

1. Melt the butter on medium low. Don't let it brown.

2. Add the flour and cook for 3-4 minutes. Gradually whisk in enough milk for a rather liquidy sauce, then gently boil it to thicken. If it is too thick, add more milk - you can always add more but you can never add less. Mix in your nutmeg at some point, too.

3. When the sauce is at the desired thickness, you are ready to assemble the lasagna. You should have at the ready:

1.5-2 c grated parmesan cheese. This is very important.

How to assemble a lasagna:

You need your bolognese sauce, your bechamel, your noodles, your greased pan, and your parmesan.

Put a layer of bolognese on the bottom of the pan. Then put a layer of noodles, followed by bechamel,  followed by bolognese, followed by parmesan. Repeat these layers until you run out of space in your pan. Try to eyeball the right amounts so you don't end up skimping on anything. You need to end your layers with a bolognese-parmesan one. The parmesan will get nice and golden brown on top, which is pretty to look and and delicious to eat.

Cover loosely with tin foil and bake for 20 minutes. Then take the foil off and bake another 10. If you need to, broil for about 2 minutes at the very end to really get things nice and golden. Despite wanting to gobble the whole thing down like Garfield as soon as it comes out of the oven, it benefits from a "cooling off period" - this will enable you to not burn yourself on the one hand, and on the other hand, to remove slices of lasagna without them looking sloppy and shapeless.


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Pizza: New and Improved!

GUESS WHAT!?


You can make really good pizza dough in about 2 hours. And you can do it in your own oven. Remember this recipe for ciabatta? If you halve it, it makes a perfect pizza dough crust for two. Note that you can make this dough by hand, but a kitchenaid-type device certainly makes things faster and easier.



To prove this to you, I invite you to imagine you are biting into the pizzas in the following photos:


We divided our pizza dough into two personal pizzas so we could have two types. One has red onions, red peppers, and mozzarella, and the other has spinach, cherry tomatoes, and mozzarella. We baked them at 500º on a pre-heated baking stone for about 15 minutes.


This dough is amazing and I urge you to try it. I imagine it would do well on the barbecue too, although this is an adventure I have yet to try.

Spaghetti Aglio E Olio

E red peppers e chives...


If you plan on kissing, make sure your kiss-ee eats this too. It's for garlic lovers!

You need (serves 2):

1/8 tsp red paper flakes
8 cloves of garlic, thinly sliced
4 tbs olive oil
spaghetti for 2
2 tbs minced chives or 2 tbs chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley
1/3 of a red pepper that needed to get used up (optional but yummy)

1. Heat the oil on very low in a large cast-iron skillet (big enough to toss the pasta in later). Add the garlic and let it cook.

2. Meanwhile boil your water with lots of salt. When it's boiling, add your pasta.

3. Pour yourself a glass of wine and chop up your chives and/or parsley and/or peppers.

4. Wait for the garlic to get a bit brown on the edges. Hopefully this will correspond with your pasta being almost done. At this point, toss in your peppers and parsley/parsley substitute and the red pepper flakes.


5. When your pasta is done to your liking, drain it and toss with the oil etc. Add salt and pepper to taste and enjoy!

Veggie Lasagne

Warmer weather means that I have fewer hankerings for large pieces of meat and long-braised stews. But I'll always love cheese.

You need:

1 tin tomatoes, diced or crushed (depending on how chunky you want your sauce)
1 medium onion, finely diced
3 cloves of garlic, minced
1/2 c red wine (optional)
1/2 c stock of some sort... i used chicken
1 tbs olive oil
1 or 2 bay leaves
1 or two carrots, grated
1/2 a red or yellow pepper, thinly sliced into 2" pieces
1 smallish zucchini/courgette, thinly sliced
2 handfuls spinach or 1/2 pack frozen spinach, diced
2 handfuls fresh arugula (optional)
some lasagna noodles (i used oven-ready ones; if you aren't you'll have to boil them first)
250 ml cottage cheese (it is tradition in my family to use cottage cheese. please don't kill me!)
250 g grated mozzarella
4 tbs parmesan cheese

1. Saute the onion and garlic in the olive oil over medium heat.

2. Add the tomatoes, carrot, spinach, stock, and wine, if using. if you're not using the wine, add a bit more stock. I like to add grated carrot to the sauce because the sweetness of the carrot takes the edge off the acidity of the tomatoes, and you don't have to resort to sugar, as some do. The sauce will be delicious on its own, and if you chicken out at this point, you can always eat it over other pasta. It's a good default sauce.

3. Simmer until reduced a bit; I used this time to chop my other veggies.

4. In a casserole dish, layer sauce, then noodles, then cheese (some cottage, some mozza), then zucchini; then sauce, then noodles, then cheese, then peppers and arugula, if using; then sauce, then noodles, then sauce, then the rest of the mozza and all the parmesan.

5. Cover with a lid or tinfoil and bake in a 375ºF oven for 30-40 minutes; then uncover and bake another 15 minutes, until the cheese is toasty on top.

There is no "served" photo because I actually think it's impossible to make a lasagne stand up properly as they do on the box of noodles. :) But it was delicious and you'd never know there was no meat. :)

Spaghetti Primavera

This is such an easy and healthy dinner.


That is, until I smothered it with parmesan cheese!

You need:

Enough pasta for 4 people (or two people, or one person etc. My amounts are for 4 because we like leftovers.)
Red bell pepper, quartered and thinly sliced
Zucchini, halved lengthwise and thinly sliced
3 cloves of garlic, minced
Half a red onion, quartered, then thinly sliced
1 cup arugula or baby spinach
3 tbs olive oil
salt and pepper

1. Put on a big pot of water and while you're waiting for it to boil, chop up your veggies.

2. Saute your onion and garlic in 1 tbs of the oil in a pan.

3. When water is boiling, put your pasta in that pot, and at the same time, put the red pepper and zucchini in with the onions and garlic.

4. When the pasta is cooked, drain it, then put it back in the pot with the other 2 tbs of olive oil. Add your veggies on top, and the arugula. Season to taste and toss to coat the pasta in the "sauce".

5. Drench in parmesan cheese, and eat up!

I served this with homemade bread and a caesar salad with pancetta. (The pancetta is really easy - all you do is separate out your pancetta slices and arrange them on a paper towel on a plate. Put it in the microwave for about 2 minutes. That pancetta will crisp up like nobody's business and you can put it on anything! Pasta, salads, in sandwiches...! YUM!)