Oh, lasagne… is there anything I won’t do for you?

For you, I would slave over the stove for hours to create the perfect ragu to lovingly spread between your silky layers.  I would whisk furiously to make a voluptuous bechamel to further your perfection.  I would squirrel away the best Parmigiano-Reggiano for you and you alone.  But, I have now come to a terrible realisation, dear lasagne.  All these years, all the stirring, the whisking, the grating, the love, and still I have wronged you.

Until yesterday, I have never made you your very own pasta.

I am so sorry.  You deserve better, lasagne *sniffle*

Fresh lasagna sheets from the supermarket simply won’t cut it any more, now that I’ve made my own and forget about dried, no need to cook lasagna!  My beautiful lasagne absolutely must have freshly rolled, home-made pasta.

Ahem.  I’m sure you didn’t come here to listen to some crazy lady talking to her lasagne, so without further ado… on to this month’s Daring Baker’s challenge!  The March 2009 challenge is hosted by Mary of Beans and Caviar, Melinda of Melbourne Larder and Enza of Io Da Grande. They have chosen Lasagne of Emilia-Romagna from The Splendid Table by Lynne Rossetto Kasper as the challenge.

This is the first time that I’ve made a lasagne completely from scratch.  (Well, to be fair. I didn’t mill the flour or make my own cheese, but you get what I mean, right?)  I’ll happily spend hours cossetting a ragu, throw together a great bechamel, but I’d never considered making my own lasagna sheets.  I have no idea why as I make my own ravioli quite a lot; making pasta isn’t difficult, just a little space-consuming in my little kitchen.  However, now that I’ve done it, and relatively successfully, I’ll certainly be making my own lasagna sheets.

I made the ragu and bechamel on Thursday; both straightforward once you get over the milk curdling scarily in the ragu.  Yes, this is normal. Yes, it’ll stop looking weird if you just let it do its thing on the stove.  And yes, you will find youself panicking even though you know it’s going to happen.

On Friday morning, while looking at the Daring Kitchen forums, I belatedly noticed that the posting date had been brought forward by two days.  I hate being late—you wouldn’t think so, considering how often I am late—so gone was my leisurely day of slowly and lovingly making pasta, then assembling the lasagne.  I was in a rush!

Making the pasta dough was fun, if a little messy.  I usually toss it all into the food processor until it reaches the bread-crumb stage, but being a good little Daring Baker, I proceeded to make a big mess on my worktop.  Like I said, fun   I had to add an extra egg and a few teaspoons of water squeezed from the spinach to get the dough to the right consistency, but I almost always have to add extra liquid when I make pasta.

Amazing what a difference kneading makes!

Lucas was fascinated by the creaking noise of the pasta machine and abandoned Peppa Pig for long enough to turn the handle and roll out two pieces of pasta.  I wish I’d been able to geta picture as it was really, really cute. Half-way through he turned round and said, “Mummy, I love making food!” He’s the sweetest little boy ever and was so proud to eat his pasta.

Following a tip on the private forums, I stacked all my sheets of pasta between layers of clingfilm which worked a treat and saved so much space.  I’ll definitely do that again.

I did take space-saving a little too far.  I decided that as my sheets of pasta were paper thin, I wouldn’t bother to blanch them in boiling water.  I just couldn’t picture getting my mountain of pasta drained properly on sheets of kitchen roll before assembling the lasagne.  And it was getting late, and someone else sait it worked out just fine for them… So, in they went, raw.

I think this would have been absolutely fine if I’d had a lot more bechamel.  I had to thin it a few times when reheating it as it just kept thickening even further, and I’m guessing that the lasagne soaked up plenty of the sauce when it was baking.  So, my lasagne didn’t have the gorgeously creamy white topping that it should have done, despite me holding back a really generous amount when I was building it.  It still tasted great, though.

I managed to use all the ragu, and all but three sheets of the spinach pasta, giving me eight layers. Wow!  It was really impressive to cut into it and see all the wonderful layers; the bechamel and ragu melted into the layers making everything was just so rich, voluptious and delicious.  How could it be otherwise?  It was lasagne.

I must thank our lovely hosta Mary, Melinda and Enza for a fantastic challenge.  We all loved the lasagne and I’ll definitely be making it, and variations, in the future.  How awesome would this be with roasted butternut squash?  I have to… after all, I have years of shocking neglect to make up to my lasagne…

Check out the Daring Blogroll to see all the other incredible lasagnes!

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On a cold day, there’s nothing better than a hot bowl of soup.  Thick with a variety of colourful vegetables and, ribollita is just the sort of soup I had in mind when the weather took a chilly turn last week.

Ribollita is a traditional (peasant) Tuscan soup whose name translates as ‘reboiled’.  As it sits on the stove for a few days, being reheated and dipped into whenever one is hungry, it develops amazing flavour.  True Tuscan ribollita goes through several stages: the soupy first stage, a starchier second stage where the soup is layered with some stale bread and then it turns into almost a hash.  This is documented beautifully over at Hedonia, complete with gorgeous photographs, for the curious amongst you.

As much as I love a good culinary adventure, I just wanted soup.  No, I wanted very good soup, so I elected to follow Skye Gyngell’s recipe which replaces the bread element of the soup with farro.  Except that I couldn’t find farro, even after making a special trip to Waitrose—no hardship, I got to pick up some of their new cupcakes—so I substituted another ancient grain: spelt.  And as I had a bag of dried borlotti beans kicking around the larder, I used those instead of buying a bag of cannellini beans.  Channelling my inner peasant-girl!

Incidentally, if you have difficulty cooking dried beans, then soak them for up to 24 hours, rather than just overnight.  I know, I know… forward planning is required, but if your beans are a bit on the elderly side (alas the expiry date on the package is next to useless where pulses are concerned) then they’ll need an extra-long soak to enable them to cook all the way through.  I have not-so-fond memories of spending hours boiling chickpeas, only for them to remain horribly hard and mealy in the centre.  After trying the bicarb trick, the flour-paste trick, and cooking them in bottled water (in case my tap water was too hard) I soaked the beans for a full 24 hours and, voila!  Perfectly cooked chickpeas.

But back to the soup.  Straight after cooking had finished it was good.  After sitting for a few hours and being snacked on, it was great.  Reheated the next afternoon for lunch it was absolutely divine.  Intensely savoury, rich, filling and just bloody gorgeous, really.  It still tasted fresh and wholesome, which is quite remarkable after such a long cooking time.

It vastly amuses me that an old and thrifty Tuscan peasant soup is now so fashionable.  But I guess bold flavours will never go out of fashion, and now that I’ve discovered it, I’d never want to be without this soup…

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This month The Daring Bakers are making pizza for the first time.  Yup, that’s right.  This is the first time that we as a group have tossed and twirled dough around to make pizza!

Our host Rosa from Rosa’s Yummy Yums chose Peter Reinhart’s pizza dough recipe from The Bread Baker’s Apprentice—coincidentally, last month’s challenge came from the same book—and left us endless options for toppings.

I did have a bunch of fancy thoughts about toppings—fig and feta over caramelised onions would have been gorgeous—but what with Lucas’s birthday and various other things, I was pushed for time this month.  So, I played it safe (and simple) and made pepperoni pizzas for Dave and I.

The dough was pretty sticky, more like a foccacia than any pizza doughs I’ve made before, but still relatively manageable.  The trouble came when I came to toss the dough…

I tried—oh, how I tried—to toss the pizza dough, but it was impossible.  Within two bounces on my floury little fists it was see-through in the centre and with a further toss it just tore.  I ended up pinching the edges of the holes together and praying that the pizza wouldn’t stick to the baking sheet.  Needless to say, I do not have a picture of my disastrous attempts and I’m pretty sure that I won’t be getting a job in a pizza parlour any time in this lifetime!!

I sauced the pizzas with a little passata, simply seasoned with some dried oregano, salt, pepper and a pinch of sugar then piled on a mixture of shredded mozzarella and grated pecorino.  I tried to be restrained with the pepperoni slices, but wound up overlapping and tucking them in wherever I could as it looked so good!  When each pizza came out of the oven I added some freshly torn basil for extra flavour—echoing the herbs in the sauce—and colour.

My pizza was good, but… I have to be honest and say that I didn’t think this was the best pizza crust recipe ever.  It struck me that this was the sort of recipe that needed a furiously hot wood-burning oven—Hi Jeremy!—rather than a domestic oven to cope with the high water content.  It did develop good flavour overnight and it was very, very thin, but it came out doughy rather than crispy despite extra time in the oven.  (And believe me, my oven was very hot!)

I’ll be sticking with my current favourite crust recipe—the lavash crackers from last month’s challenge—for the moment, but I’m glad that I got the chance to try out a new recipe!

Thanks for a fun challenge, Rosa!  And don’t forget to check out the other Daring Bakers pizzas on the blogroll.

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After the wild sugar excesses of the last week, we all needed something savoury as an antidote…

Despite being only 100km from Rome, Abruzzo is one of Italy’s little known regions.  A hidden gem, if you like.   It is sparsely populated and rarely visited by tourists but boasts stunning mountain and sea views with a correspondingly rich repertoire of robust mountain dishes and an abundance of seafood specialities.

In Abruzzo sheep and goats are farmed up on the mountains, grazing on Alpine meadows during the summer and driven down to the lowlands to over-winter.  As other regions of Italy revere the pig, so do the Abruzzese treat their sheep.

This lamb sauce or ragu is in the tradition of Abruzzo but with one notable exception: I completely forgot to add some crushed dried chilli which turns up in almost all savoury dishes in the region.

The traditional pasta shape would be maccheroni alla chitarra or guitar pasta.  (Thin sheets of pasta are rolled over a box strung with thin wire to create square-cut spaghetti.)  I used fusilli lunghi pasta which looks like a very long piece of coiled telephone cord (from when phones still had cords!) or like a terrible late-eighties spiral perm.  I picked it up as it looked fun and because, like bucatini, it was hollow inside meaning that it would soak up loads of flavour from the ragu.  (The pasta shape is from Campania, but I figured that the Abbruzese wouldn’t be too upset as it tasted delicious!)

This is a rich, mellow sauce with beautifully tender lamb.  I liked the texture of the chopped as opposed to minced meat—it made the sauce more robust.  This is a very simple, delicious and cheap pasta dish—useful with a recession looming—that I’ll be certain to repeat throughout the winter.

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Tuscan rosemary, raisin and olive oil bread

Pan di Ramerino is a Tuscan bread flavoured with rosemary (ramerino means rosemary in Italian), raisins and olive oil.  Originally it was a Florentine Easter tradition; street vendors would sell the large, fragrant buns as the congregations came out of church on the Thursday of Holy Week (Maundy Thursday in the UK).  Nowadays it can still be bought at Easter, but it is easily bought in bakers throughout the year as it is too delicious to keep for just one day a year!

On Friday morning I was up at the crack of dawn–in fact, I was up before dawn–as I had to let in the guy who was putting up our new fence in the back garden.  In a somewhat sleep-deprived haze, I decided that then would be the perfect time to bake.  While flicking through Culinaria Italy the other day I had spotted the Pan di Ramerino amidst a large array of Italian breads and the sweet and savoury nature of it intreigued me.  I’ve seen a few baking recipes that use rosemary, but I’ve never actually tried one out.

Alas, there was no recipe in Culinaria for the rosemary bread so I had to improvise somewhat.  I did take a quick peek at Ada Boni’s Italian Regional Cookery to confirm that it was just a plain white dough that I needed to make and then went boldly forward.

I used a scaled back version of my Farmhouse Bread dough, but removed the butter as plenty of extra-virgin olive oil would be worked in later.  In my sleep-deprived state, I forgot that the rosemary-infused oil would need time to cool down, so the dough was almost fully risen when I set out the pan to cool.  Whoops.  Don’t do as I do, do as I say and make the infused oil as soon as you’ve set the dough to rise.  You should probably avoid snoozing on the sofa between rises, too, unless your kitchen timer is aggravatingly loud.

Incorporating the oil into the dough was hard and messy work.  The dough rebelled against the large amount of oil and the dough turned very sticky and gloopy.  I found that the best thing to do was to trickle a little oil onto the dough, smooth it over the surface and then start to knead.  Rather like giving someone a massage, really.  By contrast, working in the sugar, salt and raisins was much easier.  I did have to sprinkle some extra flour over the dough as it was still a bit too sticky to shape.  All of a sudden the dough came together into a nice, plump, glorious ball and I quickly shaped it into eight balls.  A short rise, for which I managed to stay awake, and then into the oven.

The rosemary flavour was on the faint side in this batch of bread, so next time round I would chop some of the rosemary finely before infusing into the oil for a more pronounced flavour.  The aroma was great, though, and by the time the bread was cooling on a rack the whole house was beautifully perfumed.

I would definitely make pan di ramerino again.  The crumb of each bun was deliciously soft, slightly peppery from the good olive oil, beautifully fragranced with rosemary and subtly sweet.  With each bite the sweetness and the rosemary flavour (and aroma) built up on the palate.  The buns are actually pretty satisfying; I had one for lunch and didn’t feel the slightest hunger pangs until late afternoon.

Interestingly, before I mentioned the Easter connection to Dave, he commented that it tasted a bit like a Hot Cross Bun, and yes, they’re very similar actually.  Both have a sweet bread dough, dried fruit and a cross on top.  I love these little coincidences… I wonder which bread came first?

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Orecchiette alle broccoli e peperoncino

Orecchiette come from Puglia, the heel of the Italian boot. The name means “little ears,” and the pasta is not only a beautiful shape but a very functional one, too. The indentations in the pasta catch the sauce ensuring the most marvellous flavour with every bite.

Traditionally orecchiette are made using a dough of flour, water and olive oil–no eggs here! It’s a very time consuming pasta to make, as each little eat is rolled, cut and shaped by hand. Or by thumb, actually. The final shaping into the characteristic ear shape is done by pressing your thumb into a piece of dough to create the little pocket.

Ideally you would make Orecchiette alle broccoli e peperoncino with broccoli rabe or rapini–sold as tenderstem broccoli in the UK–but regular broccoli is still absolutely delicious.

For such a simple set of ingredients the resulting dish is remarkably complicated in flavour. The bitter and slightly metallic taste of the broccoli melds beautifully with the sweet garlic, salty anchovies and the heat from the chillis.

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I’m a real sucker for cute fruits.

I found some little donut (or saturn) peaches at the supermarket and after exclaiming in delight at their shape, I bought a few with nothing in particular in mind.

Fast forward a few days, and after trying one, I thought it might be best to poach them. It might just have been that one peach, but it wasn’t as juicy and sweet as its fragrance had led me to expect. Poaching is a great way to improve disappointing peaches (and other fruit).

However, I only had two little peaches left and it seemed mean to just serve up one fruit apiece for dessert. So I threw the fridge door open and waited for inspiration to hit me. And it did.

In the depths of the fridge sat a half-full pot of cream and a tub of low-fat Greek yoghurt. Combined with some toffee-ish eucalyptus honey and gelatine, I knew they’d make an awesome panna cotta. Yoghurt–or yogurt if you’re across the pond–may not be a traditional ingredient of panna cotta, but it really does make a superb modern version. Seriously creamy, without burdening you with too much guilt, and a lovely little tang at the end that keeps you coming back for more.

I poached the peaches in some wine syrup. Alas, no recipe here. I just chucked the end of a bottle of cava into a pan, threw in some sugar and let it boil for a few minutes before adding the peaches. They poached for no longer than 10 minutes before cooling in the now rosy-pink liquid. I think the best thing about the donut peaches is popping out the stone from the middle of the fruit and being left with a perfect ring of white peach. So cute.

Finally I also made some pine nut brittle to add some crunch, since both the peaches and panna cotta were very smooth. Making brittle is really easy as long as you avoid burning the sugar mixture. My first attempt involved a sugar thermometer and resulted in some ghastly-tasting burnt brittle as I chose to believe the thermometer rather than my nose. The damn thing’s going in the bin.

I’m pretty proud of how well this dessert turned out. The panna cotta was just set, with that sexy wobble that is the hallmark of all great panna cottas, and it was incredibly creamy. The peaches turned out fresh, juicy and silky smooth with an incredible fragrance enhanced by the wine. And let’s not forget the crunch factor! The slightly salty crunchiness of the pine nut brittle was fantastic with the other components.

If there was such a thing as a dessert Olympics, this would run a very close second–maybe even a photo-finish would be required–to the strawberry soup. It’s that good.

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Pesto can be found everywhere these days, but making your own still yields the best flavour and best of all, you can customise the texture (or indeed the ratio of the ingredients) to your own tastes. There are no definitive recipes… just whatever tastes good to you.

I had planned to use my home-grown basil to make the pesto, but the current crop is pathetically small. So, to fulfil my desire for pesto I bought a few packs of the supermarket stuff and supplemented it with as many leaves as I could scrounge off my poor little plants. (I’ve since discovered that they were root-bound, so they now live in much bigger pots.)

One of the traditional Ligurian ways of serving pesto is on troife pasta. Troife is a simple, hand-rolled pasta shape that looks like little twisted spirals–also reminiscent of a unicorn’s horn–which cleverly catches pesto in its spirals and grooves. If you fancy trying to make your own trofie, directions (with photos) can be found here.

I don’t know who first had the idea of adding green beans and potatoes to pesto and pasta, but they are an unsung hero. This was such a great combination, and it could only get better if you leave your pesto coarse and get a different flavour combination with each forkful. So fresh and peppery from the pesto with smooth, almost buttery slices of potato and a nice crisp bite from the beans.

Absolutely delicious and so easy to do, too.

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Maro is a Ligurian sauce of fresh broad (fava) beans, mint, olive oil and Pecorino cheese. Like pesto it can be used in several ways. Here, I’ve used it as a spread on bruschetta, but it can also be used to dress pasta, stirred into soups or used as a condiment alongside boiled or roasted meats.

You’re supposed to use fresh broad beans for this recipe, but the ones at the supermarket looked a bit ropey so I opted to use frozen podded beans which were probably much fresher than the ones in the vegetable department, anyway.

Shelling beans was a new experience for me and I was shocked to discover how thick the skin surrounding the beans themselves were. I pinched at loose bits of pale green bean skin, tore, then popped out the bright green and tender beans into a fresh bowl.

Once I got into the swing of things it went quite quickly and I could almost picture myself doing this whilst sitting in the shade of an olive tree at a beautiful wooden table in Liguria. Alas, the sound of a bus driving past jolted me back to reality.

A quick blitz in the mini food processor with the rest of the ingredients and the maro was made. It tasted great straight away, but I decided to chill it for a while to let the flavours blend.

When hunger struck, I sliced up some pain de campagne–alas, no ciabatta–rubbed it with some garlic and olive oil then toasted it in the oven to form bruschetta. When cooled slightly, I piled the gloriously green paste on top of each piece, drizzled some extra-virgin olive oil all over and then tucked in.

The maro was smooth and creamy with an initial hit of garlic, then the fresh flavour of the beans. I was only going to have a couple of bruschetta but I wound up going back for more and more… The lasting impression on my palate was the cooling sensation of mint. I’m not normally a fan of mint in savoury foods, however, this worked somehow and I think it is the cooling/refreshing feeling after each mouthful that made the maro absolutely addictive for me.

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…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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