Huevos rancheros

I haven't posted a recipe in a while. I must make a confession, my dear food-blogger friends: since I started living 'alone' I've been cooking less. Cooking for yourself is a lot less fun than for you and somebody else. So, I make interesting stuff mostly when I invite people over, or if my dear roommate and friend Melynda and I decide for example to have brunch together, or some after-dinner snack. These are usually very fun occasions. So here is an example of something that we've made last Sunday: huevos rancheros! We're both in a Mexican mood because we're going to go to Mexico together soon. It's really exciting! So what's best than cooking something out of my 'Mexico - the beautiful cookbook', given to me by my Mexican friend Romelia?

Huevos Rancheros y frijoles refritos / Ranch-style eggs and refried beans
To make this delicious dish, simply fry 1 tbsp chopped onion in olive oil, add 1/2 clove garlic, and 3/4 cup finely chopped tomato. Cook for 2 minutes, then add 1 chile serrano, finely chopped. Add salt and pepper and cook for another 3 minutes.
In another pan, fry two eggs in some olive oil. Serve the eggs on top of a tortilla (we simply warmed it up on the flame of the stove, but it should be fried according to the original recipe), and add the tomato sauce on top. Serve hot. In my opinion, the egg yolk should be liquid, and ready to overflow when poked with a piece of bread. This grossed out Melynda, who had to cook her yolks more in the microwave :)
These eggs are particularly good when eaten with refried beans. These should be prepared by frying 1/2 onion in 1/2 cup oil or lard - but I used just 2 tbsp olive oil.. Then add 4 cups of black beans (I used canned beans, with their liquid). Add salt and cook them while mashing them in a coarse puree. I ended up using a blender. Serve them with some queso fresco or feta cheese crumbled on top. My personal touch was adding a teaspoon of honey to the beans, during the cooking. Also, we added some cilantro and cheddar cheese flakes on the tomato sauce, as you can see in the picture.
This makes a delicious and satisfactory brunch :)

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.

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).

L'importante e' variare

For some reasons, I've been receiving "Newsweek" in the mail box at my name for the past two months. Not sure how it happened, or how long it will continue, but so far, I kind of like it :). I like to read about the main news of the week, they always have reports that seem to be quite balanced. Moreover, they often have more "society/health" related things, which are interesting too. In their last number, they have a long article that I didn't completely read yet, about science and the media talking about food. They show how confusing it is for people to understand what's "good" or "bad", if they want to follow the suggestions that scientific studies find and media report. Basically, in the course of the past ten years, it's been said every possible opinion about every class of food: eat more carbs than fats, then the opposite, fish is good, but then, it's also full of mercury, eggs have too much colesterol, but at the same time, one egg per day is supposed to be good according to some other studies.. recently, on NPR I heard an expert discussing how soy products are bad for you - so, forget about proteins taken from something different than meat..
In summary: just a crazy mess. In my opinion.. everything is good if you eat a little bit of everything. Obviously, I have some favorite ingredients, but maybe it's more a cultural thing than anything else. At least one of these ingredients: olive oil, garlic, onions, tomatoes (and recently, yogurt) is basically always present in my dishes.
For the rest, I try to vary. Also, I try to make both me and Lucas happy.. he seems to need more meat and proteins than I do, so I make meat at least twice per week, and then we alternate that with fish, eggs, pasta, seitan, tofu, cous cous and so on.
So, I collected a few pictures from last week dinners.

Zuppa di tofu con contorno di insalata di erbe al vapore / Tofu soup with steamed creasy greens on a side
The recipe is quite simple (this was for a night were we weren't too hungry): bring some water to boil, dissolve a vegetable bouillon in it, add the tofu cut in cubes, some spinach, seasonings (olive oil, salt, pepper, curry if you want it more indian-like) to taste. Serve with some rice or cous cous. If you want it richer, add an egg or two in the soup and scramble with a spoon. It will give a nice thicker consistency to it and it will make it more chinese-style.
For the side dish: I bought these 'creasy greens' that I had no idea what they were. I looked for them on the web, and found out that they're very popular in the South, and apparently really easy to grow..and I agree, they're really good! I just steamed them and tossed them with some olive oil, salt and lemon juice. They tasted very nice, kind of like collard greens but less strong. :)

Pollo e patate al forno / Baked chicken and potatoes
This dish is really easy and Lucas likes it a lot - me too.. :) It also reminds me of an old Italian song that my dad used to song, so it makes me happy to remember about it. :) (The song is really silly.. spaghetti, pollo, patatine, una tazzina di caffe'.. a malapena riesco a mandar giu'.. :) ).
I think you can easily guess how to make it, but just a few details: I like to make the potatoes in a different pan than the chicken, so they don't get greasy, but I guess if you don't care you could, so they would taste more like chicken. I just toss them with olive oil, salt, garlic powder and oregano or rosmary. Also, if you put salt and rosemary or oregano on the chicken before putting it in the oven, it takes a nice taste. It does take a while to cook this dish, but you don't need to take too much care of it. Basically, you flip the chicken legs and you mix up the potatoes every 20 minutes - it usually takes 2-3 flips before the chicken is done.. for the potatoes, it depends on how big you cut the pieces.

Uova all'occhio di bue con fagioli e sedano/ Sunny-side-up eggs with beans and celery
Isn't this dish pretty? :) I like to make colorful dishes. :) It's also very easy... and it made me happy that I could make a good egg dish different from frittata (my typical way of using eggs, I'll talk about it another time). Eggs were always related in my mind to those evenings when we didn't have anything else in the fridge, and my mom made them with some ham that wasn't good enough anymore to eat by itself (not to criticize her, it was actually a good idea :) ). This dish, though, was quite good and merry - and as easy to make. :) Basically, I sauteed some onions and pieces of celery in olive oil, added canned tomatoes and canned mixed beans, spiced it with salt and pepper. After the sauce was thickened a bit, I broke the eggs in it and covered. The only difficulty of this dish is to get the timing right for the eggs. In fact, if you do, you'll get a wonderful crispy white and a tasty liquid yolk, that spills out as soon as you hit it with a piece of bread to eat it.. But if you overcook it, the yolk becomes solid, and if you undercook it, the white is slimy (better the first than the second one). To get it right, you need to help the white cook fast enough.. since the part that doesn't touch the pan and is on top of the red tends not to cook.. so you'd better pour some hot olive oil or sauce on top of it, so it gets cook by the heat of it. But other than that, the egg 'all'occhio di bue' (look for 'occhio' and 'bue' on wordreference.com to understand how we call the sunny-side-up egg!) is easy, quick and good! If you like, you can add some cheese on top of it before removing it from the pan (in the picture, you can see some melted cheddar cheese).
And if you don't use all the bean and celery sauce, you can use it the day after for a good pasta dish! Just dilute it with yogurt and spice it up with a little curry or curcuma or something similar.


Pesce al forno con barbabietole e kale/ Baked mackarel with beets and kale
Usually I make fish in a pan, but today I wanted to try to bake it. I just made a bed of greens, cut some beets and put the makarel on top of it, with some garlic, salt, olive oil, and white wine. You can see the picture of the preparation above (I didn't take a good picture of the cooked dish :( ). I cooked it for about 40 minutes at 350F, flipping the fish once. The result was good, I especially liked the taste and consistency of the fish better than when I cooked it in a pan. The greens were a bit too crispy, though, in particular those that were on top. Next time I'll try to cook it in a smaller pan, so that the greens are completely covered with the fish fillets and are not exposed to the direct heat of the oven. I served it with whole basmati rice.