Ricette con gli asparagi

Better late than never, here are my entries to the event that I host myself.. the 'Fresh Produce of the Month', this month centered on Asparagus!

Definitely quite in season during the past month, I had various occasions to prepare different types of food with this delicious vegetable. I'll present here two dishes: Tortine di asparagi e feta (Asparagus and feta tartelettes) and Asparagi olio e limone (Asparagus with olive oil and lemon).

Tortine di asparagi e feta / Asparagus and feta tartelettes
Steam a few asparagus for ~7 minutes. In the meanwhile, thaw a sheet of puff pastry and fill some tartelette shapes with it. Prepare a mixture of 2 eggs and ~1/2 cup of shredded feta cheese. Add salt, dried oregano and black pepper. When the asparagus is ready, cut it into pieces that can fit the tartelette shapes. Place on top, and cut away the extra pastry dough, so that in the end it just fills perfectly each shape. You can fold a little border of dough over each shape. Bake in the oven at 350 F for about 20 minutes, until golden.
One puff pastry dough sheet was a lot for the six tartelettes I prepared, so I made an extra small cake with the leftovers:
Both the tartelettes and the cake were really good. I was very happy of this quick recipe that I made up based on what was in the fridge. Moreover, this was the first time I used my tartelette pan. It's in silicon, and it worked really well for this. The tartelettes came out very easily from it when they were ready, more beautiful than ever!
Because this dish came out so well, I'm presenting also for the 'Monthly Mingle' event, centered on Hors d'oeuvres and Appetizers, which I'm right on time for! This lovely event was started by Meeta at 'What's for lunch, honey?', but this month it's hosted by Mansi at Fun and food

Here is one last tartelette, shown here to make you feel like trying this recipe out. :)


Asparagi olio e limone/ Olive oil and lemon asparagus
This is the easiest and my favorite way of eating asparagus. To make it, just steam the asparagus for ~10 minutes, and serve them with a sauce made by mixing together with a whisk ~4 tbsp olive oil, 2 tbsp lemon juice and salt. Then, sprinkle pieces of parsley leaves on top.. Delicious!
This time I tried a mixture of green and white asparagus. The white asparagus is cultivated without light, and using more UV light. I never tried them before, and knowing that they are supposed to be a delicacy, I decided to buy them. I wasn't too impressed by them. The green asparagus have much more flavor, at least to my taste!

Cena turca: salsine e 'ravioletti'!

Nicola lent me an amazingly pretty Turkish cookbook, and so last week I decided to prepare an all-Turkish dinner. Most of the things that really inspired me were the appetizers: in Turkey there are a lot of interesting so-called 'Meze', which include dips, finger food, and nice little dishes to start the dinner with. If you make enough of them (like I did....), they seem to provide by themselves a wonderful dinner. I loved the dips in particular: so easy to prepare, different in taste, and delicious!
I'll show here a few of them, starting with this delicious walnut and pomegranate dip, which will also be my entry to the 'A fruit a month' event, based on pomegranate!

Salsina di melograno e noci / Pomegranate and walnut dip/Muhammara

'Muhammara' is Arabic in origin, and can be also made with lemon juice instead of pomegranate juice. This recipe and the following ones come from the wonderful book 'The complete book of Turkish cooking', by Ghillie Basan, which I strongly recommend to anyone interested in learning about this great cuisine.

To make this dip, you can either use a mortar and pestle or, if you're lazy like me, a blender. :) Pound/blend roughly one cup of walnuts, 1 garlic clove, and 1 tsp cumin seeds, roasted. Add ~1 slice day old bread, soaked in water, and 2 tsp tomato paste. Add also 1-2 tsp sugar, 1-2 fresh chillies or 1 tsp chili powder and 2 tbsp pomegranate syrup. Instead of buying some premade syrup, I blended one whole pomegranate and added it to the dip.. So my dip looks quite different from the picture in the book, as it is less liquid. Finally, add ~1/2 cup olive oil (I added much less than that), and serve with a decoration of parsley leaves and warm pita bread! I made this dip twice (both times using the whole pomegranate, as I thought it made it really good). The second time I didn't add any hot spices, and it was still delicious!
So this dip goes to Sra at 'When my soup came alive' for the 'A fruit a month' event that she's hosting, themed on pomegranate.. great choice, Sra!

The second dip I'm presenting is based on cheese and yogurt.
Salsina di formaggio e yogurt / Cheese and yogurt dip/Pasa Ezmesi
This is even easier than the other dip: just mash a ~9 oz piece of feta cheese or 'Beyaz peynir' (I couldn't find the latter, unfortunately), add ~1-2 tbsp yogurt (I actually added more, as I thought it was too solid otherwise), 1-2 tsp hot paprika, 1 small bunch parseley leaves, finely cut, and salt to taste. Serve with hot pita bread and lemon wedges, to sprinkle on every bite.. Again, this dip was so good that I already made it twice, once hot and once not, with great results in both cases. Not sure why I decorated it with mint instead of parsley.. :)

I prepared a few more delicious dips, but I have no pretty pictures of those. So, instead, I'm going to describe the last meze we had: Manti! I was very excited at the idea of making manti since I first read about it on the blog 'I love Turkish Food'. Recently, also my friend Elif posted about them. I thought of them as a sort of 'ravioli' Turkish style, but after I really looked up the recipe, I found out about a fundamental difference: Mantis are baked! Ravioli are boiled. Also, the dough for Mantis is spread a little thicker than ravioli, and the traditional shapes are a little different, although I'm sure there are many possible others. The filling that was recommended in the book is not a very traditional one (I was told by Elif), but we all thought it was delicious - and it's vegetarian!

Manti ai ceci / Chickpea parcels
To make the dough, mix 4 cups flour, 1 tsp salt, 1 egg yolk and 1 whole egg. Add as much water as you need in order to obtain an elastic dough. Knead for ~10 min, and then let it rest for ~ 1 h. Prepare the filling: you'll need to have ~14 oz pre-boiled (better than canned!) chickpeas. Mash them (I had to add water for this), and add 1 tsp cumin seeds, crushed, and 1 tsp red pepper or paprika, and salt to taste. For the sauce, saute one onion and 2 garlic cloves in 1 tbsp olive oil + 1 tbsp butter. Add 1 red chilli, finely cut, 1-2 tsp sugar, and 1-2 tsp dried mint (I added fresh mint instead). Then, stir in 14 oz canned chopped tomatoes, and cook until thick. Adjust with salt and remove from heat. For the yogurt sauce, you'll have to mix ~6 tbsp thick yogurt with 2-3 garlic cloves, crushed.
By the time you're done with all this, one hour should have passed, and you can start making the manti: roll down the dough till very thin (we used a rolling pin), and cut it into small 1" squares. Spoon a little of the chickpea filling, and close the edges forming a litter pyramid:
Place the mantis in a buttered oven pan, and bake at 400 F for ~15-20 minutes, till golden. Then, add vegetable stock to it. For this dose of mantis, you should add a total of ~2 1/2 cups stock, so divide it depending on how many pans you made. Cook for another 15-20 minutes, till almost all the broth is adsorbed. Then, serve with yogurt, tomato sauce, and chopped parsley on top.

These mantis are addictive! Elif told me that the dough was right, and also the slightly crunchy consistency of the manti. She never tried the chickpea filling and she really liked it too! So, I was very pleased at this success. To give credit to the right people, I only prepared the sauces and the filling for this - Lucas, Vardha, Filipe and Vlasta did all the rest of the job while I was finishing to prepare the dinner!!! Great job guys!

Un brunch particolare

Some time ago I made a really nice brunch for Lucas and myself, using a recipe that I found on my favorite 'San Francisco flavors' cookbook. I never had time to post about it, and this is now the perfect occasion, as it sports the fruit chosen for this month 'A fruit a month' event: papaya!
To be really honest, I don't usually like papaya too much. This is strange, because I like almost anything. Papaya has a strange aftertaste that somewhat bothers me, when I eat it raw: after the sweet feeling, there is something that remains in my mouth and reminds me of fermentation and, somehow, cheese. I know it's just a weird idea that I have, but I cannot it too much of it raw. But, in this particular dish I'm showing, I really liked it. Maybe because the person who thought about it somehow read my mind and decided to accentuate this 'aftertaste' by just combining it with.. brie! So, here I present to you...

Quesadilla con brie e papaya / Papaya and brie quesadilla
(Recipe adapted from 'San Francisco flavors' - originally, the quesadillas are baked, and more fats are used).

Prepare the filling by mixing one papaya, peeled and diced, one onion, thinly sliced, the juice of two limes, 1 jalapeno chilli, minced, and 1/2 bunch cilantro. Melt 1 tbsp butter in a separate bowl. Lightly butter (with a separate piece of butter) an anti-sticking pan, and place it on the stove on moderate heat. Place a large tortilla on it, and add some of the papaya mix on half of it. Add a few pieces of brie (you choose how much). Close the other half on top, and brush with some of the melted butter. After ~5 min, flip the quesadilla paying attention not to pour the filling everywhere in the pan. Brush more butter on top of the quesadilla, and cook for a few more minutes, till the brie is melted. Repeat till all the filling is finished. I used only half of it, it was enough for a brunch for two. The quesadillas should be eaten hot.. They can also be used as appetizers, if you cut them in wedges before serving. I made them a few times, as they are really quick to prepare and delicious, and unusual too!

Altro che Napa Valley....

Last week Lucas and I organized a wine and cheese tasting party at our place. Inspired by another home-made beer tasting party, we thought: why spending so much money to go to a wine tasting, when we can have it at our place? So we invited a lot of friends over, and asked them to bring a bottle of wine or a piece of cheese they thought was inspiring, and we ended up with a nice collection of bottles and cheese to try altogether!
Lucas and I went to 'The Cheeseboard' here in Berkeley to get our cheese. I'd never been there, and I loved it! These people have cheese from all over the world, and the best thing is that they are very nice and they let you try anything you ask for. It's a good place also if you don't know anything about cheese: you just ask if you can try, for example, some cheese coming from Italy and made with goat milk, and they'll give you a few different pieces to taste and then you make your choice! And also, they are perfectly fine at cutting a very thin slice if that's all you want to buy. This last thing would not happen in Italy... Although, of course, the prices would be much lower there.. :) In any case, it's a very nice store, strongly recommended to anyone who comes to Berkeley!
So, we got a piece of 'Tome de Savoy', some gorgonzola 'Galbani', some delicious cheese from Wisconsin (recommended by our server), and some pecorino toscano. This was the fruit of a half an hour of a few tastings... We also got some brie and feta cheese from our usual 'Berkely Bowl'. For the party, I prepared a few appetizers, so in the end this was our table:
There were crackers with feta cheese, almonds and honey...
.. and others with brie, avocado and radish, and at last with gorgonzola, radicchio and walnuts.
Then I made some salad boats with a mixture of ricotta, radish, olives and pepper flakes:
And of course, I baked some bread to eat with all the good cheese. There was my usual biova, and another experiment with whole wheat flour, spelt flakes, pistachio nuts and walnuts.
The selection of wines was very nice, although mostly red wines. This whole tasting experience was a lot of fun. If you have the opportunity, I'd recommend trying it at your place!
To end the party, I made an almond cake, to eat with an Italian spumante that we bought:
This cake was actually delicious, so I'm going to give the recipe in the next post.

Weekend Cookbook Challenge 'Show and Tell'

I was really sorry I couldn't participate to the previous edition of the Weekend Cookbook Challenge. The theme was intriguing (DVD and dinner), but I didn't have enough time to seriously think about it. But this time, it's really easy for me: the theme is 'Show and Tell' , and the idea is to choose a recipe from a cookbook you particularly like or you have some special reason to show it. And I do have at least three cookbooks I'd love to show (my new Mexican cookbook given by Romelia, the 'San Francisco flavors' cookbook given by Stefano, and 'In Nonna's kitchen' given by Giovanna). I already posted recipes for the first two, so maybe someone already saw how glad I am to have them. I decided to use 'In Nonna's kitchen' for this event, because the idea behind this cookbook is definitely worth speaking about.
The author, Carol Field, went for a trip to Italy and interviewed many 'nonne', i.e. grandmas. They talked to her about their lives, their food traditions, and they gave her a few recipes they really loved. I really like this idea, and that's what I'm going to do next time I go to Italy and meet my grandmothers. In the book, there are pictures and interviews with 16 grandmas. The stories are really interesting - the women come from different regions of Italy, and their age varies between 60 and more than 80! So both the lives and the recipes are quite different.
What makes this book also unique, is that one of the grandmas interviewed is Giovanna's! She told me when she gave me the book. So, I feel like this book is very precious, and I enjoy reading it. I'd recommend it to every American who wants to know some of really traditional Italian cuisine. For me, some recipes are so 'obvious' that I don't even need to read them, it's just the way my own mom taught me. So, I'm sure someone who hasn't been trained by an Italian mother would find this book really helpful.
I'll post here about two recipes I prepared: 'Torta di porri e zucca' (Leek and Butternut squash tart) , and 'Crostini con le fave' (Crostini with pureed fava beans) .

Torta di porri e zucca (Leek and Butternut squash tart)
This recipe is given by Rina Ramponi, and is from the Norther Tuscany. It's very good and it was eaten too quickly for me to take a picture of the whole tart. :)
Ingredients
Dough
2 cups flour
1 1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup olive oil
10 tbsp cold water
Filling
3 tbsp olive oil
4 medium leaks
3/4 lb butternut squash (cut into 3/4 inch cubes) - total ~2 cups
1/2 cup Parmigiano cheese (I used pecorino romano)
1/4 teaspoon salt
Pepper
Procedure
For the dough: mix flour, salt, olive oil and slowly add the water, till the dough is smooth. Make a ball out of it and leave it wrapped in plastic wrap for 30 min at room temperature.
For the filling: heat olive oil and add the leeks, cut into thin slices. Cook for ~ 10 minutes. Add the butternut squash (there were also ~8 oz chard leaves that I didn't have, to add at this point). Cook for another 5 minutes (I cooked it longer, at least 10 min), then add the cheese, salt and pepper.
Divide the dough in two parts (one slightly larger). Spread the larger one in a ~13 inch circle with a rolling pin. Place in a 9 inch baking pan (previously oiled), covering the bottom and the borders. Then add the vegetable filling. Spread in a circle the other piece of dough, and place on top. Fold the borders from the bottom circle on top of the upper circle of dough, and cut extra dough away. Add olive oil on top, pierce the crust to allow steam to escape, and bake at 375 F for ~50 min, making sure it's baked evenly all around.
Serve as appetizer or main dish, depending on how many people you have at dinner! It's very good and quite unusual.

Crostini con le fave (Crostini with pureed fava beans)
This recipe was given by Nella Galletti, and it's an Umbrian variation on the traditional Tuscan Bruschetta.
To prepare it, she uses dried fava beans, but I had some fresh ones, so instead of 1 1/2 cups dried beans, I used ~10 big fava beans, and I cooked both the beans and the skins, cut into pieces. The skin part has some strings in it, so if you want to serve the crostini to guests that you think may be bothered by them, just stick to the beans. But in my opinion, though, the skin part has even more taste than the beans..
Roughly cut 1 medium onion, and saute it in 2 tbsp olive oil. Add the beans (previously soaked overnight if they were dried), and the skins, if you're using them. Add 1 1/2 tsp salt, and enough water to cover the beans. Cook for ~ 30 minutes. The water should not be all consumed, so add more if necessary, so you have some left when done.
When done, drain the beans, reserve the extra water, and puree the beans with 2 more tbsp of olive oil.
Grill slices of bread, then spread garlic on them and sprinkle olive oil on top. Add a few tsp of the cooking water, and then spoon some of the bean mixture. Serve warm.. They are very good, and again, a taste quite different from usual bruschetta :)

Waiter there's something in my.. meatless barbecue!

Wow, luckily enough I found out that the deadline for 'Waiter there's something in my...' event is today! So I'm still on time.. I have the perfect entry for the 'meatless barbecue' dish that Cooksister suggested:
Bruschette con verdure e tofu grigliati e salsa al mango e tomatillos/ Grilled veggie and tofu bruschette with mango and tomatillo salsa!

I made this dish for a quick lunch with Lucas some time ago, and never had an occasion to post about it.. but it's so colorful and it was so good, that it's worth writing about it!
I used the wonderful grill I gave Lucas when he moved in, all alone, in Berkeley.. It's a 'panini grill', with two grills, that can be open, or kept at various heights, so that one can grill vegetables, meat, bread, or toast panini.. it's wonderful, and I love to grill veggies on it.
This time, I grilled asparagi and zucchini and tofu, I sprinkled them with olive oil, and added finely cut garlic and parseley. Then, I toasted some pieces of bread on the grill, and I nicely arranged the veggies and the tofu on them, adding some of the good olive oil/garlic/parseley mixture on top (see picture above).
To complete the delight, I made a quick mango/tomatillo salsa to go with it, by chopping in small pieces 4 tomatillos (see this post for more info about them), one Manila mango, half an onion, one Fresno chili, and adding some finely cut cilantro and olive oil. It's on top of the bruschetta in the middle of the picture above, and at the bottom of the plate to eat with some more bread!
It was a nice and simple Saturday lunch. :) Thanks Cook sister for bringing up this great theme and giving me an occasion to remember about this!

Ricette di primavera per il Monthly Mingle

In the past few weeks I bought some typical springtime products: asparagus and artchokes. So I decided I will post the recipes of the really simple dishes I made with them as my entry for the Springtime-themed Monthly Mingle hosted by Meeta! Actually, I just checked her website, and she also posted an asparagus recipe! :) Well, asparagus _is_ the typical spring vegetable.. :) Anyway, her post to see lots of interesting properties of this food.

Asparagi sempilci (Simple asparagus)
This is close to a typical Italian recipe for asparagus, except I added the cilantro and had lime on a side instead of lemon in the sauce.
Boil or steam (I opted for steaming, it's easier not to overcook them) one bunch of asparagus. Hard boil two eggs. Prepare a sauce with the hard yolks, smashed with a fork with ~2 tbsp olive oil, salt and a little bit of finely cut cilantro leaves. Mix up well, and spread on the center of the asparagus. Sprinkle olive oil, a little salt and lime or lemon juice on the rest of the asparagus not covered by the sauce. I made this plate for four people, thinking there would be some left. They were all gone in a few minutes :)

Carciofi ancora piu' semplici (Even simpler artchokes)
This is a typical Italian way of eating artchokes, and it's really simple and good and Americans are usually surprised because they never had them before this way :) :) So, just clean the artchokes, slice them thin, add olive oil and salt on them, then thin slices of parmigiano (not too many, in my opinion), and grind some pepper on top. That's it! If the artchokes are good, like in this moment of the year in California, it's a really good dish.

Torta Pasqualina

Torta Pasqualina literally means 'Easter cake' in Italian. It's a typical Easter dish from Piemonte and Liguria. You can recognize it from the other many savory cakes that we have in Italy because it has whole eggs that are baked in it. The dough is a layered dough, a bit like 'fillo dough', but thicker. It's called 'pasta matta' (i.e. crazy dough). Here is the recipe, adapted from Gianfranco's recipe at cooker.net.
Ingredients:
1 lb flour
1/2 cup water
5 tbsp oil
1 lb spinach (it should be biete, a long leaf green vegetable that I couldn't find here, and spinach is a good substitute for it).
1 lb ricotta
1 cup parmigiano, grated
5 eggs
Procedure:
Mix the flour with the water, the oil and a pinch of salt. Knead the dough for ~10 min, then let it rest for at least one hour (I did overnight). In the meanwhile, make the filling: boil the spinach for five minutes, then sautee them in some butter (I added a bit of garlic because I like it). Add salt, ricotta, parmigiano, a pinch of pepper and one egg, and mix well.
When you're ready, divide the dough into ten parts (the more the better, it's supposed to be 33 like the years of Christ!!! - but I opted for ten.....). Roll the dough down as thin as you can. You should obtain discs to cover your baking pan with each piece of dough. I wasn't able to roll them down so much and it was still ok, so don't worry if you can't. Put the first disc of dough in the baking pan, spread some olive oil on top, put the second disc on top, and continue for five (or half) of the discs. Now put the fillingon the dough. Make four dips in the filling, and break the four eggs in them. Sprinkle some extra salt on the eggs.
Add the rest of the discs, still putting olive oil between each of them, and add olive oil also on the last one. Fold the ecces dough on top of the cake.
Preheat the bread at 400 F and cook for ~1 hour. Cool down before serving (it can be eaten a bit warm, but not too much). It's DELICIOUS!!!!!
This is also my special entry for the 15th Weekend cookbook challenge, hosted by me for this edition with theme 'Easter and Springtime food'. The deadline is tomorrow (I'm on Pacific time so you're not late yet!!!). I'll post the summary in one week.

Polpettine di fagioli di soia

I don't remember if I already wrote it somewhere in this blog, but I'm becoming more nad more vegeterian.. so a few days ago I made these very good 'soybeanballs' :) - I found the recipe on the soy bean can!!
Polpettine di fagioli di soia / Edamame patties
Blend one can of soybeans with 1 cup bread crumbs, 2 tsp peanut butter, 1 tbsp soy sauce, 1 tsp grated ginger, 1 tsp nutmeg, 1/2 cup cilantro leaves. Warm up 3 tbsp olive oil in a pan. Make little patties with the paste you prepared and gently palce them in the hot olive oil. When brown on one side, turn them over and finish cooking them. It was supposed to be served with some gravy, whereas I served them with whole weat rice and a cabbage dish that I prepared by stir frying olive oil, onions, and pieces of cabbage, and adding yogurt and paprika 2 minutes before they were done.
Mmm.. :)

Frittata di pasta

I've been wanting to publish a post about this very simple dish in a while, and today I finally remembered after seeing Susan's post about Spanish Tortilla de Patatas (Frittata di pasta reminds me a lot of that dish, except for the fact that I use just the amount of oil strictly necessary for preventing the frittata from sticking to the pan). Frittata di pasta is a very easy and tasty way to use pasta leftovers. Frittata means 'omelette' in italian, although usually Italian frittate are thicker than French omelettes. Anyway, you can in principle put anything in a frittata, including pasta leftovers. It turns out really well and it usually impresses Americans who never had anything like that. You can eat it hot or cold, and is thus perfect either as main dish, or as appetizer, or as party finger food.
Frittata di pasta / Pasta omelette
Ingredients:
6 eggs (you can use more or less eggs depending on your taste. The more eggs you add, the easier it is to have it stick together)
~2 cup pasta leftover (whatever sauce you had is fine)
Cheese (either 2 tbsp parmigiano or 1/2 cup any other cheese that will melt, diced into small pieces)
Salt, pepper
Olive oil (2 tbsp)
Procedure:
Beat the eggs with 2 tsp salt. Mix with the leftover pasta. Add black pepper to taste, and the cheese. Heat up 2 tbsp olive oil in a pan, till quite hot (it should become less viscous than when it's cold). Spread on the bottom of the pan, then pour the pasta/egg/cheese mixture. The pan should be of a size such that the egg/pasta mixture fills it completely. Cover with a lid, and cook on medium heat for at least 7 minutes. Check, and if there's almost no more liquid egg left you're ready to flip it, otherwise let cook covered for a bit longer. If you're ready to flip, first make sure the frittata is not stuck to the bottom of the pan by passing a plastic spatula between the border of the frittata and the bottom of the pan. Then, while wearing a glove that protects your left hand from the heat, hold the lid upside down in your left hand, and with your right hand slide the frittata from the pan onto the lid, so that the uncooked side is still face up. Flip the pan and place upside down on top of the frittata. Now flip the whole pan with lid, and place back on the stove. So now you should have the uncooked side being cooked. Let cook on Med-low heat for another 5 minutes and serve hot (for example with some tomato sauce, or chutney, like in the picture below), or cold, sliced into small pieces to serve at a party (like in the picture on top).

Sformato di spinaci e dolce di ricotta

I mentioned I tried a few recipes from 'Cucina di tradizione del Piemonte n.2' for the weekend cookbook challenge. So I took the occasion of a Sunday get-together with many friends to prepare two more recipes taken from that book: a spinach 'sformato' (sformato is something that you bake and it's not sweet, and has some sort of self sustaining shape (forma=shape, in Italian) and a ricotta dessert.

Sformato di spinaci / Spinach sformato

1 lb spinach
1/2 lb besciamella
2 tbsp grated parmigiano
2 tbsp salt
4 eggs
Prepare a spinach puree: boil the spinach, puree them, and mix the besciamella with them. Besciamella is the white sauce I already gave the recipe for here. Add the parmigiano, salt, and the eggs, beaten. Pour in a buttered and floured pan and cook in the oven in a double boiler at 350 F for ~45 min (until a knife comes out dry from it). When cold you can 'sformarlo' (take it out of its baking pan) on a serving dish. Serve it warm. It's really good! I'd suggest it also for people who don't usually like vegetables very much.

If you 'read more' you'll find the ricotta dessert.

Dolce di ricotta / Ricotta dessert / Torta 'd seirass (Piemontese!)

I was quite curious about how this dessert would come out. Even if it's in this traditional Piemontese cookbook, I never had it before.
8 eggs
1/2 lb ricotta
1/2 lb powder sugar
rum
1 1/2 cup almond flour
1 3/4 cup butter
Separate the yolks from the eggs. Beat the yolks with the sugar, add the ricotta, the butter, softened, and the almond flour. Beat the whites till stiff and mix together with the other ingriedents. Pour some rum in the serving pan, and the mixture of all the ingredients on top. Refrigerate for at least two hours before serving.

It turned out to have a good flavor but a funny consistency. I refrigerated it for ~6 hours, and it was half kind of solid and half liquid (the bottom part). So we when served it, in cups, it was a little bit like an 'ile flotant'. I must admit that I cut quite a bit on the butter, and most of all, the recipe didn't specify how much rum to put - and since I like it, I may have put too much (~1/2 cup?).. this was probably the reason for the fact that not all the dessert was dense.. but the taste was very good. A friend of mine added some coffee liquor to it, and it was a nice idea too :)

Cena con Cinzia, Marzio e Orazio

After we went to Villa Genero, Cinzia invited me to have dinner at her place, and cook together. Both Cinzia and I like to cook and when we're together it's a lot of fun to try new recipes. I like to cook with Cinzia, she's so relaxed, so it's really just fun. We decided to make a hazelnut cake and some cheese fluffy appetizers. We took the recipes from the book 'Cucina di tradizione del Piemonte -ricettario a fumetti', which I gave her for Christmas, after trying so many good recipes from it.
So I'll post the recipes and pictures here! But before that, a portrait of Cinzia's family - a very intellectual family :) :)


Gonfiotti al formaggio (Fluffy cheesy appetizer)
1 cup water
2 tbsp butter
4 tbsp white flour
2 eggs
4 tbsp grated parmigiano cheese
olive oil
Add the butter to the water and bring to boil. Add the flour while stirring for about 2 minutes. Remove from the stove and then add the eggs one at a time, mixing well. Then add the parmigiano, while still stirring. Warm up the oil in a pan and add the batter in small amounts, and fry until you obtain nice fluffy and golden 'clouds'. Serve warm or hot. They're delicious!

Torta di nocciole (Hazelnut cake)
3 eggs
3 1/4 (100 g) tbsp butter
1 2/3 (200 g) cups flour
2 cups (200 g) roasted and coarsely ground hazelnut
1 cup milk
1 cup sugar
2 tsp baking powder
Beat the eggs, add sugar, flour, butter, and baking powder, and when it's a nice cream, add the hazelnuts. Warm up the milk and add it, mix and let the whole mixture rest for 10 minutes. Preheat oven at 320 F (160 C). Butter and flour a pan, pour the batter in that and cook for ~30 min. Serve cold.
Here is Cinzia preparing the cake. Note the wooden spoon - she said it is necessary to use that in order to make a really good homemade cake :)

Now, wasn't this a nice dinner? Gonfiotti al formaggio, some tomatoes, and a cake :) - just perfect!! Ah, such nice memories..

Cena piemontese

Sorry guys for this long absence.. I was in California for about a week, giving talks and interviewing! My life is still completely in the air, but anyway :)
Before leaving, we had a wonderful dinner with my Italian friends. I wanted to do this for a while: they are all from different places, and none of them from Piemonte. So, I wanted to let them taste my regional food.
This was the menu:
Appetizers:
Insalata russa (russian salad)
Tacchino tonnato ('tuned' turkey)
Insalata alla Marta (Marta salad)
Main course:
Agnolotti di magro con ragu' (Lean agnolotti with ragu)
Dessert:
Bunet
Piemontese cuisine is a very 'strong' cuisine. Mountain people, they like meat, eggs, butter. But they can make amazingly good and different food with these simple ingredients. Piemonte (and Torino in particular) is also the land of chocolate, so our desserts are usually chocolate-based. Piemonte is also one of the best regions in Italy for wine - Barolo is one of the best, then we have Nebbiolo, Dolcetto, Barbera.. - . So, if you ever visit Italy, you _have_ to go to Piemonte and try our food.
Piemonte is also the heaven of cheese (as Susan recently found out). Unfortunately it's almost impossible to get them here, so I couldn't add this important course to my dinner. I also couldn't find a lot of our typical meats and vegetables, so I had to tweak the recipes a little bit.. but they were all very good. Pictures and recipes follow!

Insalata Russa
For some reason this salad is called Russian salad in Italy - although I don't think
it's really Russian.. It's delicious. To make it, you have to boil ~1/2 lb peas, 3 carrots, 3 potatoes (add some salt in the water). Cut the carrots and the potatoes into pieces. Boil also 2 eggs till hard, and cut them into pieces too. When everything is ready and cold, mix together with 1 can of tuna, a few pickles (we would have 'giardiniera', a mixture of pickled celery, peppers, and other veggies, but I couldn't find it here, so I used Lucas's mom's pickles) and some home-made mayonnaise (see recipe below). If you use pre-made mayo, it will still be good, but not as good, so I really think you should try to make it! :) Decorate with the veggies and parsely leaves.
Other versions do not include the tuna, but in Piemonte if there's no meat, people are not happy :)

Maionese
Always make your own mayonnaise!!! It's not hard if you use a beater. My grandma used to make it by hand, and that sometimes doesn't work (the oil and the eggs/lemon separate and you can never get to the right consistency). But with a beater, it really takes 5 minutes.
To make it:
Take 4 egg yolks, add a bit of salt, the juice of one lemon, and start mixing with a beater. Add olive oil a little bit at a time. It will take a about 1/2 liter (2 cups) olive oil for that much eggs. If you add less, the mayo will be more liquidy, if you add more, it will be more solid. This amount of mayonnaise will be good for the russian salad above, and you will still have a good amount left (~1 cup, if I recall correctly). This mayonnaise tastes SO much better than the one you buy.

Tacchino tonnato
This appetizer is a modified version of the real 'vitello tonnato': I should have used veal, but in America veal is as expensive as gold, so I decided turkey would be good anyway :)
Basically the idea is to have thin slices of meat covered with this sauce made of mayonnaise and tuna. More precisely:
2 tuna cans
2 anchovie fillets
20 capers
1 lb mayonese
Blend anchovies, capers and tuna, and stir the mayo in the mixture.
Spread the slices of meat on a nice plate (I used sliced turkey, the one people use for sandwiches), and cover them with the sauce (do not drench them, just a thin layer will do it). Decorate with capers. I'm sorry but the picture I took of my dish is terrible, so the picture shown here is 'vitello tonnato' from this nice Piemontese cuisine website (they're a bit more fancy, with all that green added as decoration.. that's not traditional! :) )

Insalata alla Marta : I already posted about it. This time I had apples instead of mango.

Agnolotti di magro al ragu'
Making agnolotti was an adventure. I'll write a post specifically about it.

Bunet
I already posted the recipe for this gorgeous amaretti-chocolate-coffee-rum pudding.
Check it out!

And all this food was accompanied by some really good bread that I baked:
I'll post this recipe separately.

Festa per il Dr. Lucas :)

Last Sunday we threw a party in honor of Dr. Lucas! (Or Dr. Baby as Vlasta calls him :) ). It was really nice, most of the people we invited came, and we all talked and had fun for a long time. In the end, we remained sitting in a circle we our closest friends, and it was really nice. As always, the end of the parties is the best time :)
This is Dr. Lucas with his balloon :)
People brought some food, and we also made some.
This is an example of the wonderful food that our guests brought:
It was a layer of cream cheese with some very good tomato/spiced sauce on top, and pieces of shrimp. There were also breaded mushrooms, little cakes, and Lucas made some very good beef fajitas.
But.. the new edition of Weekend Cookbook challenge is on Party food, and so I decided that I'm going to partecipate to it for the first time, and I'm going to present the food I prepared for this party! I found out about the Weekend Cookbook challenge by chance, while I was looking at some blog I don't remember. It's a really nice idea and I was looking forward to participate to it. Every month, a theme is issued, and the theme of this month is Party food, as I mentioned.
So, this is the list of food I made:
Focaccia alla ricotta e pesto (Focaccia with pesto and ricotta)
Focaccia al formaggio, pomodori e olive (Focaccia with cheese, tomatoes and olives)
Bigne' alle olive e ricotta salata e bigne' al tonno (Puffs with olives and ricotta salata and puffs with tuna)
And on the sweet side:
Crostata alla ricotta (Ricotta tart)
Bigne' al cioccolato (Chocolate puffs)
Bigne' al mango (Mango puffs)
So if you're curious to see pictures and if you want the recipes, read more!! :)

What are the main characteristics of a good party food? It must be easy to eat, and it must be appetizing, so just the little bit you pick each time must be so good that you will want more of it :)
On the savory side, one of things I like best to make for parties is focaccia.
For people who don't know, focaccia is the 'white' version of pizza. White because it doesn't have tomato sauce, like all pizza usually has. Moreover, focaccia is thicker and softer than pizza. It's better for parties than pizza, because it's easier to eat. It's best when hot but it's good also cold. It usually doesn't have time to get cold, though, because it gets eaten very quickly :)
So this time I made focaccia con ricotta e pesto:
And focaccia con pomodori, formaggio e olive:
I wrote how to make focaccia on another post, but I'll repeat the recipe here, also because I slightly modified the doses and the timing (I'm getting a lot of experience with baking and bread lately).
So, for the dough:
Warm up 1 cup of water until about body temperature, dissolve 2 tsps yeast in it, stir, add 1 tsp sugar, stir and check that bubbles are produced. Leave on a side for ~ 5 min. In a big bowl, pour ~5 cups flour (you can use white, whole or a mixture of the two). Add the water and yeast mixture and mix. Add 2 tbsps olive oil. Then keep adding warm water and work the dough until it's elastic. It usually doesn't take more than a total of 1.5-2 cups of water but it depends on the flour you're using. Add ~1 tbsp salt and knead well the dough in order to incorporate it. Let rest for 1 to 2 hours. I usually spread the dough after this passage, and the pizza came out always good, but if you want a _really_ good focaccia you should be more patient and knead the dough a little bit after this time, and let it rise again for another hour or two. Then, spread the dough, usually you can do it with your hands but if you can't, use a rolling pin. I usually spread it on some foil with a bit of olive oil on it so it doesn't stick. You can add the ingredients you want on this dough, and then you should let the dough rest for at least another 10 min (in the quick version), up to 1 hour (in the long version). Warm up the oven to 400F, and cook for about 20-30 min (it depends on how thick you made it). Serve hot.

For the focaccia con pesto e ricotta, to make the topping, prepare some pesto without cheese: just blend together a bunch of basil, 2 cloves of garlic, and nuts. I used walnuts for this focaccia and it was delicious. In real pesto you should use pinenuts. Add ~2-3 tbsp olive oil and then add ~1/2-1 cup of ricotta. The doses depend on how much pesto/ricotta taste you want and how big is your focaccia surface :)
For the focaccia con pomodori, olive e formaggio.. well, obviously: slice 2 tomatoes, place them on the focaccia, cut some cheese that melts well (e.g. Munster is good, or Colby. I don't like Cheddar because it gives an orange color to the pizza!!. Use 1/2 cup to 1 cup depending on how cheesy you want it), and some olives, and place everything on the focaccia.

Bigne' con olive e ricotta salata and bigne' al tonno
The focaccia was really good, but these puffs are the things I was the most proud of, so if I had to pick only one of the things I made for the Weekend Challenge, I would choose these, and in particular, those with olives and ricotta salata.
To make the dough, I followed the recipe I already posted earlier for bigne'. Just, since I found they were too rich last time, I cut a little bit on the butter (which was already cut compared to the Southern Cooking cookbook I took them from..).
I invented the two stuffings, which I was very happy with.
For bigne' al tonno, I mixed some tuna (2 cans) with yogurt (~1/2 cup, very much approximatively), olive oil (1 tbsp), 1 apple cut into pieces, salt, ~1/2 cup ricotta and fennel seeds.
For bigne' alle olive, I mixed 1/2 cup spicy olives, cut into pieces, salt, 1/2 cup ricotta salata (it's a salty and hard ricotta cheese that I can find at Whole Foods), ~1/2 cup yogurt, and ~1/2 cup cottage cheese. These were really delicious. You can watch a close-up here:
On the dessert side, the crostata for Dr. Lucas was very good.
I didn't take a good picture of it, though, so you can half-see it in this picture where Dr. Lucas is cutting it :)
To make it, you should prepare a sort of crostata dough, like I explained in previous posts. In this case though I put a little less butter since there was going to be ricotta on top, and I added an egg and 1/2 teaspoon baking powder. But you could use the same dough for crostata and it would be good. Spread the dough on the bottom of the baking pan (on a baking sheet), and around the borders (~1" high). Then, mix 2 cups of ricotta with 4 tbsp sugar, 2 tsp cinnamon, 1 egg, beat very well, and make a nice smooth cream with it. In the most typical Italian crostata di ricotta there are also raisins in this cream, but I didn't want them because I wanted to add some chocolate on top for the decoration. Spread the ricotta cream on the dough, bake in the oven at 400F for ~20 min or until the crust that you see on the borders is golden brown. Decorate with chocolate on top.

But the best desserts were the bigne'.
Bigne' are a wonderful thing you buy in pastry stores in Italy, and they can be filled with just whipped cream, or with chocolate sauce, or with egg creams. They are wonderful and I was really happy I found out I could make them at home.
Again, the dough was the same as I posted earlier, just I didn't add any salt in this case. I prepared two fillings which I made up and were really delicious.
For the mango filling: blend 1/2 mango with 2 tbsp milk, 4 tbsp sugar (to taste), and ~ 1 cup ricotta. For the chocolate filling: melt two cubes of baker's chocolate with ~1 tbsp milk and 1 tbsp sugar. Let cool down. Beat ~1 cup heavy cream with ~4 tbsp sugar, until firm. Add the chocolate sauce to it and mix together gently. This sauce was so delicious. Eating it inside the bigne' it was a gastric orgasm :)