A new 'favourite'....

I've waited a long time to try out this dish. I spotted it in Mediterranean Escapes by Rick Stein when I first bought it years ago and wanted to try it as my hubby adores butterbeans and I knew he would love it. Unfortunately the key ingredient, a mallorcan sausage called sobrasada wasn't available to buy in the U.K at the time so when I saw it as a new addition to the range carried by The Tapas Lunch Company last week I was quick to order some to try. So quick in fact they also sent some free :)

So on to the dish in question. It's a wonderful one pot (well two if you count the tomato sauce pan)wonder, which I always like, less moaning by the dishwashers about the mess I have created! And the recipe is as follows..

• 100g/3½oz dried butter beans (ideally judión), soaked overnight, or 225g/8¾oz butter beans from a jar, drained and rinsed
• ½ tsp salt
• 4 free-range chicken breasts, skin on
• salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• a good pinch of peperoncino, or crushed dried chillies
• 75g/2½oz sobrassada, thinly sliced.
• 350g/12¼oz courgettes, trimmed and cut on the diagonal into slices
• 300ml/10½fl oz tomato sauce (see below)
• a small handful of flatleaf parsley leaves, chopped

                 For the tomato sauce

• 3 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
• 1-2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
• 500g/1lb 2oz well-flavoured tomatoes, skinned or 1 x 400g/14oz can plum tomatoes
• salt and freshly ground black pepper

If using soaked dried beans, drain them, tip them into a pan and cover with fresh cold water. Bring to the boil and simmer gently for about 20-25 minutes until almost tender. Add ½ teaspoon salt and continue to cook until tender - another five minutes. Drain and set aside. I prefer just to open a can, less chance of forgetting to soak the beans!

 

For the tomato sauce, put the three tablespoons olive oil and garlic into a medium-sized pan and as soon as the garlic starts to sizzle, add the tomatoes and simmer for 15-20 minutes, breaking up the tomatoes with a wooden spoon as they cook, until the sauce has reduced and thickened.Season with one teaspoon salt and some freshly ground black pepper. Set to one side.

Season the chicken breasts on both sides with salt and pepper. Heat the two tablespoons olive oil in a large frying pan, add the chicken breasts, skin-side down, and cook for five minutes over a medium heat until golden-brown. Turn over and cook for a further five minutes.

Move the chicken breasts to one side of the pan and add the peperoncino or chilli flakes and sobrassada, and allow the sobrassada to melt into the oil. Turn the chicken breasts over in the now spicy oil until well coated then lower the heat, scatter over the courgettes, cover and leave to simmer gently for 15 minutes.

Uncover the pan, add the cooked or jarred butter beans and tomato sauce, re-cover and simmer for a further five minutes until the beans are heated through. Scatter with the chopped parsley and serve with either steamed rice or cooked pasta. Or simply with some bread, we found that was enough with it.

If I can't go to the Amalfi....

it can come to me, yay!  Through the pages of a wonderful book called TRATTORIA Italian food for Family and Friends.  I love everything I have cooked from this book so far and am actually rather upset that I have never tried today's recipe before. It is so good! And though I personally cannot confirm whether the food is actually like what I'll find in an Italian Trattoria when I fulfill my dreams of visiting the Amalfi my dear daughter was was actually there last year sat down to lunch and declared 'Ooh I've had this before at....' and named the restuarant. I was rather chuffed.  So here it is....

Ricotta Gnocchi

 

 

Now the recipe says serves 4, maybe as a starter, but I found it did 3 of quite nicely for lunch.

300g ricotta cheese (see below for recipe)

85g 00 flour, plus extra for dusting

1 crushed clove of garlic

2 egg yolks

sea salt, fresh ground black pepper and freshly grated nutmeg.

Mix the above ingredients together in a bowl. Be quite generous with the seasoning. Knead it lightly on a floured surface and divide up into 3 or 4 pieces to make it more managable. Roll the dough out in a sausage shape till it's about as thick as your little finger, mine was more like ring finger size actually.  Cut at an angle in to small pieces, about the length up to the first joint of your index finger. Loving all the fingers, much easier that working in cm! Boil up some salted water in a large pan and cook the gnocchi in batches till it rises to the surface. Scoop out and you can either get straight on to the next bit, or pop them in the fridge till later for a super speedy meal later on.

to cook and serve

200g of cherry tomatoes, halved

2tsp of flaked dried chilli

2 tbsp of olive oil

a handful of fresh basil, torn

Parmesan grated, to taste (nice big chunky grating, not fine, well that's my preference :-) )

Now simply heat the oil in a nice large frying pan, add the chilli, tomatoes and gnocchi and saute away for 5mins or so until the tomatoes cook down and start coating the gnocchi. Remove from the heat, stir in the basil and parmesan and serve.

Sit down and eat and be transported to Italy!

Now then, here's a great little recipe that enables you to make the ricotta you need for this recipe at a fraction of the price of buying it. It is a lovely soft creamy ricotta just like you buy in the shops!

Makes about 750g (you could half and make less)

Take  2+ litre carton  of whole milk and 250mls of double cream, put them in a saucepan along with 1.5tsp of salt and  the juice of a lemon juice. Heat it up to just under the boil,  stirring occasionally. Switch the heat off and leave it to stand for an hour. It should split up into curds and clear whey.  Transfer to a square of muslin and hang up to drain for 2-3 hours, then it's ready to use. Simples.  (you may find you have the curds but the whey isn't quite clear, if not heat it up again and add a tsp of white wine vinegar, it should instantly sort itself out).

I was most excited to find that the same author Ursula Ferigno has another book, Real Fast Vegetarian Food which I could buy for 1p + post from Amazon so that's on it's way :-) Oops, like I need anymore books!

Pizza with new potatoes, rosemary & blue cheese (v)

Of late I've been trying to introduce more vegetarian food into our menu and as a result today's entry comes from the newest edition to my bookshelf. River Cottage Veg Everyday by Hugh Fearnley- Whittingstall. I already know this is a book I'll be returning to often.

First of all you need a dough for your pizzas. You may already have a favourite one to use, if not you can't go far wrong with what Hugh describes as 'magic bread dough'. The following quantities will give you enough for 3 pizzas.

250g plain flour
250g bread flour
1.5 tsp fine salt
1 tsp easy blend, instant, dried yeast
1 tbsp of olive oil
325ml warm water.

Now there is 2 ways you could go about this, do as Hugh instructs and form a dough and knead for 5-10 mins then leave in a bowl till doubled in size, around an hour, before knocking back and using.  Or do it my way which I believe is more magical, just mix everything together till all flour is mixed in, put a bit cling on top of bowl and leave it. No kneading whatsover. Then come back 2-3 hours laters, knock back and use. 

Today I used it to make a pizza with new potatoes, rosemary and blue cheese. Well at least that's what the recipe was. To be honest someone who has recently developed a taste for blue cheese in this house had nibbled most of it when I went to get it. So today we had a 3 cheese pizza, a little bit blue, a bit of feta and some goats cheese. It worked well.

You'll need some precooked, cold new potatoes, about 300g. And 150g of blue cheese.

First of all put your oven on it's highest heat to warm up, preferably with a pizza stone in, failing that a large baking tray.

Meanwhile cut 2 onions into quarters and slice thinly. Add to a frying pan with some olive oil and cook slowly till soft, about 15 mins. Once they are cooked mince in 2 cloves of garlic and add 2 tablespoons of chopped fresh rosemary.  This mix will do 3 pizzas.

Divide your dough in 3 and roll a piece out thinly. Either put on a pizza peel or pull your hot baking sheet out the oven and work very quickly. Top first with the onions and then potatoes, finishing with the cheese. Season and trickle with a little olive oil. Put in the oven to bake for 10-12 minutes until crisp below and bubbling on top. Repeat with the remaining dough, I usually fit 2 pizzas at a time in my oven.  Serve at once.

Due to the serve at once instruction I'm afraid today's photo didn't get taken until after we'd eaten, kind of forgot in the rush, fortunately there was a bit left!

 

Dreaming of Venice.....

The most beautiful cookbook on my shelves by far is written by a lady called Tessa Kiros, all her books are gorgeous but this one really steals the show. The pages are edged in gold, the book mark is black velvet. The photograpy stunning, stumbling across scenes of Venice and little stories about the place as you flick through it.  It really is too lovely to get dirty in the kitchen and that may be why I haven't really cooked from it much yet, and to be honest even if I was never to I wouldn't part with it...  But fortunately that is not the case, the following recipe is one of my favourite things ever to do with the humble sausage.

In my head I call them Venetian Sausages but according to the book it is Sausages and Polenta, or as it puts it 'Luganega e polenta'.  I don't serve it with polenta as the family is not keen so we serve it with mash.

The recipe to serve 6 is as follows -
120g thinly sliced pancetta, chopped
6 good (and I mean GOOD) large pork sausages (about 650g) pricked all over
1 small onion, sliced
250ml white wine (or red is good too she says, I've not tried that yet to comment)

Begin by sauteing the pancetta till it releases a little oil in a frying pan which just nicely fits your sausages in. After the oil starts seeping add the sausages and cook till they are getting golden in places. Remove the pancetta and set aside till later to stop it overcooking. Add the sliced onion to the sausages and continue cooking till that is soft and golden.

Return the pancetta to the pan and add the wine and simmer for 15mins before turning over the sausages and simmering again for another 15mins. The sausages should be golden, the wine evaporated and everything looking once again like it's just frying in oil.  Serve a sausage per person along with the rich sauce over some polenta or mash.

 

I love to serve this with the cabbage that Tessa recommends - La Verza Soffagata - or Suffocated cabbage to you and me.

You simply fry a sliced onion till soft and golden in a few tablespoons of oil and then add about 750g of sliced savoy cabbage to the pan with a bit of salt and stick a lid on and cook down till it's wilted. Add 125mls of white wine and allow to bubble for a minute without the lid. Then add a couple of tablespoons of passata, 1 pint of water and a pinch of chilli. Put the lid back on, bring to boil and simmer for 30mins. After which take of the lid, turn up the heat and cook for another 10mins till most of the liquid has evaporated. By which time it should be lovely and soft, season to taste and serve.

Enjoy

 

 

Whilst we are here talking of Venice I would like to introduce you to my absolute favourite eating place, if I were to have one last wish it would be to return to this little corner in Venice and enjoy one last meal here. If you ever find yourself in this beautiful city, please seek it out...

Ostaria al Ponte

Granola

I was drawn to the following recipe due to 2 reasons, a complete lack of interest in commercial breakfast cereals, to the point I would often skip breakfast and a wonderful year for apples on my tree leaving me with ALOT of apples to find a reason for being. So I made a simple apple sauce out of them, jarred them up and hopefully they will keep me going in this stuff, which I can face quite happily each morning, for quite a while.

The recipe was found in Nigella Lawson's Feast book you can find it here

450g rolled oats

120g sunflower seeds

120g white sesame seeds

175g apple compote or apple sauce

2 teaspoons ground cinnamon

1 teaspoon ground ginger

120g brown rice syrup or rice malt syrup, or failing that, golden syrup

4 tablespoons clover honey or other runny honey

100g light brown sugar

250g whole natural almonds

1 teaspoon Maldon salt

2 tablespoons sunflower oil

300g raisins

Mix everything except the raisins together very well in a large mixing bowl.

Spread this mixture out on two baking tins and bake in a gas mark 3/170°C oven, turning over about halfway through baking and re-distributing the granola evenly during the baking process. The object is to get it evenly golden without toasting too much in any one place. This should take around 40 minutes.

Once it's baked, allow to cool and mix together with the raisins. Store airtight.

I don't stick to the ingredients list, dessicated coconut is often substitited for the sesame, or a combo of both, a mix of nuts is often used and sometimes some puffed rice cereal is substituted for a bit of the oats to give a lighter effect. Whatever use this as a base to work off and you can concoct your own 'favourite' granola.