…Or Profiteroles filled with Strawberry-Balsamic Gelato..

Summer in Britain always means strawberries and cream. Tonnes of the ruby red berries are devoured every June at Wimbledon alone and in households across the country as eager tennis fans settle down in front of the TV, bowl and spoon in hand, to soak up the sporting glamour. Or is that just me?

When I saw that this month’s Hay Hay! It’s Donna Day! (HHDD #20) was choux-themed, I immediately thought of filling little profiteroles with strawberries and cream, but then that seemed a little ubiquitous. So I toyed with the idea of stuffing choux buns with roasted butternut squash in a garlic-cream sauce, but that wasn’t very summery and Dave felt it would be a grave waste of the choux. My next idea was coffee choux buns like the ones they sell at our local SPAR, but less sickly-sweet. Somehow that didn’t seem quite right. And then I had the idea of stuffing the choux with strawberry ice-cream but with a little twist… Strawberries and balsamic vinegar are a delicious combination that is as traditional in Italy as strawberries and cream are in the UK. So, I combined those three delicious flavours into strawberry gelato with balsamic vinegar.

For the gelato you need to splash out on some good aged balsamic vinegar. The best you can afford, ideally. I bought a bottle of 18 year-old aceto balsamico di Modena which was rich, complex and very syrupy. (It left a delicious layer behind on the spoon when I drizzled some over risotto earlier this week.)

For those of you who are a bit squeamish about the whole vinegar/strawberries thing… the gelato doesn’t taste vinegary. The balsamic lifts the gelato beyond plain old strawberry ice-cream, giving it a deeper flavour and a certain je ne sais quoi. While I had the ice-cream machine out I made a very similar recipe, using Greek yoghurt in place of the cream, and significantly more balsamic which was incredible. More on that another day.

The choux buns/profiteroles gave me far more trouble than making the two ice-creams. I used the Donna Hay recipe that Suzanne did, but the paste was too runny after just four eggs—large, admittedly—so I opted out of adding the fifth. I think four medium eggs or three large eggs would have done the job nicely. As it was, my choux paste was running out of my piping bag as I was filling it. Still, they’ve turned out pretty well in the end. They look and taste like choux which is all one can ask for, really. (I baked some leftover chilled paste this morning and they came out beautifully, so if your paste is too runny you can always try chilling overnight before baking.)

To serve, I dressed the plate with some balsamic glaze, sliced a choux bun in half and filled the base with some thinly sliced strawberries. A scoop of gelato followed, then I popped the top of the bun back on and sprinkled some icing sugar over. Dave thought it would have been nice to have drizzled some extra glaze in the top of the bun as a surprise when eating; I may well try that later on.

Of course, for the die-hard strawberries and cream lovers out there, an extra spoonful of whipped (or clotted) cream wouldn’t go amiss. After all, it is strawberry season…

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Hay Hay, it’s Donna Day!

For ages now I’ve been stumbling across HHDD themes the day that entries close or just after. In December I decided to take charge of the situation and make a proper effort to keep an eye on ChichaJo ’s blog to ensure that I didn’t miss yet another one.

And hooray! My obsessiveness has paid off! This month’s theme for HHDD is pizza. Double-hooray!

Each edition of HHDD produces amazingly creative and beautiful entries and I’ll be the first to admit that I wanted to join the beautiful people—and food. I’m not sure how successful I’ve been in either the creative or beautiful departments, however I know that this pizza definitely tasted amazing, despite its rather homely looks!

My first instinct upon seeing the pizza theme was to recreate my favourite pizza: caramelised onion and feta with rosemary. It’s a triumph of sweet, sour, creamy and salty flavours. One of Mr Waitrose’s triumphs, in fact. However, as we’re (a) back on the eternal/infernal diet and (b) it’s not a pizza that Dave gets excited about—I am far too lazy to contemplate doing individual pizzas—I had to rethink things.

After some thought I settled upon making something more akin to comfort food than conceptual/cutting-edge stuff… meatball pizza.

Unlike 99% of the meatball pizza recipes you’ll find in a Google search, my meatball pizza actually contains bona fide meatballs. Lately I’ve been using an Allegra McEvedy recipe which contains two of my current darlings—pork and fennel—and makes meatballs packed with flavour that always manage to be succulent despite being baked. By happy coincidence, I happened to have a bag of them stashed away in the freezer.

Alas, my sensible stashing of food in the freezer never seems to extend as far as putting tomato sauce in there, so I put together a pretty basic tomato sauce. In deference to my week of regional Italian cooking, I did make a proper soffrito and also let the sauce bubble gently for two hours, but I’d also happily use a quick 15-minute sauce or even a jar of pizza sauce. On this occasion I had the time to let the sauce cook for ages… so I did.

I’m happy to report that the pizza delivers a double-whammy of comfort. It’s got all the familiarity and comfort of a pizza plus the spicy, snuggled-up on the sofa feel of a good bowl of spaghetti and meatballs. I was particularly pleased that I thought to drape slices of mozzarella over the meatballs to keep them from drying out. Of course, gooey cheese on top of meatballs tastes fantastic, too!

Boot notes: This is more of an Italian-American dish, although it does have its roots firmly in Naples where all the individual components hail from. So, here’s to my second dish from Campania!

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This month’s theme for IMBB (Is My Blog Burning) is dumplings of all shapes, sizes and flavours and is hosted by Jarrett of Food Porn Watch.

I had great plans to make some lovely pork dumplings with water chestnuts and mushrooms, however, I couldn’t find any wonton wrappers and really didn’t want to attempt to make them myself. I would have visited Chinatown in London to pick up all the ingredients but after two quite disastrous trips into town earlier into the week I didn’t feel that my temper would withstand a further trip….

So, I decided to look around my kitchen for inspiration and promptly realised that not only were gnocchi dumplings, but I had two packages waiting in the cupboard for me to adorn with a delicious sauce. I know that commercial gnocchi are undoubtably a travesty for Italians, however, I find them to have great taste and texture and are undoubtably the most convenient staple food to come out of my kitchen.

This recipe uses a very quick ragu to provide massive amounts of flavour with minimal effort. Previous versions have used some of my four-hour ragu which is just a little too rich when combined with the gnocchi and parmesan. You could add in celery, carrots, sliced mushrooms or whatever vegetables you have handy. It’s really quite an amenable recipe. Some sliced mozzarella placed on top of the gnocchi (before the top layer of sauce) would also be rather nice.

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