skud

Mirrored from The OEconomist. You can comment there or here.

Hey, for once my timing’s right, so I’m submitting this post to Presto Pasta Nights, hosted this week by From Kirsten’s Kitchen to Yours. If you want more pasta recipes this week, that’s the place to go.

Meanwhile… for the past few weeks at Preston Markets my housemate Connie and I have gone to this one deli to buy cheese, and every week I’ve looked at the huge mounds of fresh ricotta and thought, “I need to make something with this.” This week, finally, I did.

What we have here is a vegetarian pasta bake with ricotta, zucchini, mushrooms, and sundried tomatoes. You can substitute other veg, of course, and we had a few ideas for that which I’ll mention below. I made a baking tray full, which you can see in the pics below, and it came out to about six serves. This is easily adjusted to serve more or less, though, so just use my quantities as a guideline.

I had mine with a green salad, but there’s nothing stopping you from nomming it just as it is.

A quick note about ricotta: the kind of ricotta widely available in America, that comes in a tub and is kind of spoonable and slightly gritty in texture, won’t work for this recipe. You want the kind that’s firmer and sliceable, and probably displayed in a moulded cake in the deli, like this. In Australia, this is available pretty much everywhere. Elsewhere, you might need to go to a good cheesemonger or a specialist Italian grocery to find it.

Anyway, onward! You will need:

• pasta — penne, spirals, bowties, elbows, anything you like, really — see below re: quantity
• about 500g/1lb fresh ricotta (the firm kind, see note above)
• 1 large brown onion, diced
• a slosh of oil for sauteing, and some to grease the baking pan
• generous pinch of salt
• about 6 sundried or oven-dried tomatoes
• 1-2 medium sized zucchini, grated
• some mushrooms, sliced (we had a couple of cups, sliced, but could have used more)
• pesto – 1/2 to 1 cup, home-made or bought
• grated cheese (parmesan, cheddar, whatever you’ve got) for sprinkling on top

First boil the pasta in salted water. How much pasta? Enough that, when dry, it comes up a little less than halfway in the pan you’re going to bake it in. It’ll double in size after it’s been boiled, and you don’t want it to overflow the pan. This is literally how I measured mine, from the big jar we use, so I don’t know how much it was in weight or cups or anything, and even if I did, telling you wouldn’t help.

Now, while that’s boiling, get the onions sauteing. I like to get them so they’re starting to caramelise, so I’ll let you in on a tip. I do this lots for different dishes when I’m using the onion-and-dried-tomato combo. First, get your onions moving around in a pan with a pinch of salt over a lowish heat. As they get translucent and start to take on a little colour, get your kitchen scissors and start slicing slivers of dried tomato into the pan. Every so often, put a tiny splash of water in (just a couple of tablespoons), and as it boils and evaporates, it’ll take some delicious caramelised brown stuff off the bottom of the pan, and you can mix it around with the onions and help them brown faster. At the same time, the water will soften the tomatoes a bit and help their flavour spread around.

Once the onions are brown, throw in the sliced mushrooms and grated zucchini and give them a bit of a stir around. They don’t really have to be thoroughly cooked, because they’re going to bake in the oven soon, but it’s good to get all the vegies mixed well together. Set this pan aside.

The pasta will probably be done sometime soon. You want it to be al dente, with just a bit of bite to it, as it’ll soak up a little more moisture from the vegies in the oven. Drain it in a colander, but don’t fuss too much about getting every last drop of water off it. Throw it back into the big pot that it boiled in and add the pesto. Stir it around until the pesto is coating all the pasta evenly.

Now toss in the vegie mix, and give that a good stir too. Finally, add the ricotta, cut or crumbled into chunks about 2cm (a bit less than 1″) across, and mix it through. Don’t be too violent at this point — you want there to be delicious lumps of ricotta hidden in the baked dish, so don’t break them up too much.

All mixed up and ready for more cheese.

Finally, up-end all this into the baking dish (which, if you’re better at these things than me, you will have remembered to oil beforehand). Spread it around, then top it with some more cheese (I used a blend of parmesan and aged cheddar) and pop it in the oven at about 180C/350F for 20 minutes or so, til it’s hot right through and the cheese is nicely melted on top.

Cheesy goodness.

We’ll be doing this again next week, hopefully with more mushrooms.

I mentioned other vegetable combinations earlier, and here are some we thought would work well:

Maintain the pesto base and the ricotta, but substitute butternut squash and spinach (or similar greens) for the zucchini and mushrooms.

Drop the pesto; instead, toss the pasta in a simple tomato sauce (I’d use passata from a jar), then use eggplant, zucchini, and peppers alongside the ricotta.

Mirrored from The OEconomist. You can comment there or here.

Tonight we had this sweet potato and black bean chili, which was amazing, and I made a coleslaw to go with it that I wanted to record. Sorry, no pix, because I wasn’t organised enough before we ate and then shoved the leftovers in the fridge. ETA: I took a photo of leftovers the next day. Not bad looking for leftovers, huh?

• 1/4 cabbage, shredded
• 1 green bell pepper, cut into thin slivers
• 1/2 red bell pepper, cut into thin slivers
• 1/4 red onion, finely diced
• 1/2 to 1 hottish green pepper (jalapeno or similar), finely diced
• 1.5 oranges, peel removed and diced into 1/2″ chunks
• juice of remaining 1/2 orange
• 2-3 tblsp lime juice (I used bottled, but you could juice 2 limes if you preferred)
• salt and pepper

Throw it all together, mix, and leave to stand for about 10 minutes before serving. Give it another mix before you serve, and adjust flavours (most likely salt, pepper, or lime juice) as you see fit.

The sweet/sour crunchiness went really well with the smoky, dark flavours of the chilli and the red rice we served it with.

Mirrored from The OEconomist. You can comment there or here.

This soup’s story starts with me and Emily, last Saturday, going to a new-to-us brunch place. Our plan was to walk down to the cafe in question, then over to the nearby K-Mart to buy Christmas lights, then up to Psarakos Grocery (the big fat Greek fruit-and-veg mecca on High St), then home again: a loop of about 6km.

Between the brunch place and the K-Mart, we happened across the Northcote apple tree. You may be wondering why it gets the definite article. Well, it’s about a hundred years old, and when it was threatened with being cut down a few years ago, a group of locals clubbed together to look after it and do good things to the patch of land it’s on.

We were walking along Beavers Rd, approaching the railway line, and I said “I wonder if we’ll go past the apple tree.” About ten seconds later, we spotted it.

View Larger Map

Things have changed a bit since the Google Maps car went past. Along the fence there’s now a flourishing herb garden with mint, parsley, blackberries, comfrey, and who knows what else that we couldn’t recognise. Under the tree there are some wooden seats, a swing hangs from one of the apple tree’s branches, and against the wall in the background we found tomato plants, sage, and rosemary.

Emily and I picked some parsley and mint, weeded the mint patch a bit in return for the herbs, then continued on our way. Later, I picked up some good red capsicum (bell peppers) at Psarakos. And so a soup idea started to take shape.

Soup! (Photo by Emily)

This soup is vaguely inspired by other Mediterranean chickpea soups I’ve eaten or made, but I feel like the red peppers really push it in a Turkish direction. We ate it with fresh Turkish bread and it was wonderful.

• 2 large red capsicums, roasted and skinned
• 1 can tomatoes
• slosh of olive oil
• 1 small onion
• 3 cloves garlic
• 1 small chopped red chilli OR 1 tsp sambal oelek or similar crushed chilli
• 2 cups cooked chickpeas (from dry, or 1 can)
• approx 500mL stock OR chickpea cooking water if cooked from dry OR a mixture of both
• pepper and salt, to taste
• a few sprigs of mint, chopped
• a similar amount of parsley, chopped
• greek yoghurt, to serve

If you’re cooking chickpeas from dry, you’ll want to do that in advance. I got lucky. The ones I bought at Preston markets are Australian and seem to be pretty fresh, probably a recent harvest, because they cook from absolutely dry in 90 minutes. If you’re in the US or Canada, try Rancho Gordo beans which are amazing and cook in similarly short time. Other chickpeas might need overnight soaking and longer cooking. Canned ones would be fine in this recipe but I think the cooked-from-dry ones really added something, both in terms of flavour and texture.

To roast the capsicums: either cut them into quarters and blacken them under the broiler/grill, or stick a fork in the stem end and turn them over the gas flame of your stove, until thoroughly blistered and blackened. Allow to cool in a paper bag or in a bowl covered with a cloth. Rub the blistered skin off, then roughly chop the flesh (discarding the seeds if you didn’t earlier).

Put the chopped peppers, can of tomatoes, and stock/chickpea juice in a blender and blend thoroughly.

Saute the onions in the olive oil until translucent. Add the garlic and chilli and saute a few moments longer, until fragrant.

Add the pepper/tomato/stock mixture to the pot, along with the chickpeas. Simmer for 15 minutes, or until flavours combine and there aren’t distinguishable crunchy little bits of pepper.

Add pepper and salt to taste (I found it needed quite a bit of salt, as it was naturally very sweet.) Finally, throw in about half the chopped mint and parsley and stir it through.

Serve with a dollop of yoghurt and another sprinkle of fresh mint and parsley.

Previous soups:

• Mediterranean chickpea and kale soup
• Minestrone