Yay! I got a new pasta machine!

I got a new pasta machine a couple of months ago. A pasta machine is an absolute essential in any Italian household and I prefer the old fashioned hand roller machines as opposed to the ones with an electric motor. I just think you get a more intimate experience with your pasta plus it's a great arm work-out! Using the pasta machine brings back memories of Sunday lunches with the whole family where us kids would sneak into the kitchen and steal pieces of the raw dough that the "grown-ups" were making the pasta from- gosh it's so good!

I got a pasta machine for my 21st birthday and it lasted about two times of trying to make pasta, I took it back to the shops and got a new one on warranty and that one lasted another two rounds of pasta making before the cogs inside siezed (or something). These were just "el cheapo" brand machines so I thought this time I'll get something that lasts. I ended up getting one that is the same brand as my mum's pasta machine which has lasted her about 30 years so I figure it must be a good one. I honestly do not think that they have done much to the design in the last 30 years as mine looks exactly like my mum's. 

My new pasta machine.

I thought I would share with you the recipe for my ravioli in lemon, chilli sauce. This is the recipe I made for my Dine At Mine that I wrote about in my last post. When I was a kid, ravioli was by far my favourite meal. We would only get it on special occasions but gosh, when we did get it, it was soooo good! I loved it so much that I wanted to try and grow a ravioli tree and more than a few times, I kept the last piece of ravioli on my plate so that I could plant it in the garden in hopes that a tree would grow... It never did :( When my Nonna passed 6 years ago, I inherited her old-fashioned ravioli maker (many years later as it took a while to sort through all of her stuff) this is just as good as having a ravioli tree so once I had a pasta machine that worked, it was time to try and make ravioli.  

Nonna's "Raviolamp".

First things first, we had to make the ravioli filling. I chose a spinach, ricotta and chicken filling. Saute the onion, garlic, and spinach together until it is tender.

Sautee the veggies.

Then add the chicken and fry until cooked through.

Add the chicken.

Puree the mixture with the ricotta cheese and parmesan in a food processor until it is smooth. Set aside while you prepare the pasta.

Smooth mixture.

To prepare the pasta measure out 500 g of flour (I used 00-flour) and then make a well in the centre. Put the eggs into the centre of the well and start to mix the flour in slowly bringing in flour from the outer edges until you have a ball of dough. Knead the dough for around 20 minutes or until it is elastic and smooth or when you push it with your finger, it bounces back. Leave, covered with plastic wrap or an upside-down bowl to rest for 30 minutes.

Flour and eggs ready to become pasta.

Resting the dough.

While you are resting the dough, you can prepare the stuff for the sauce. Juice and zest the lemons and chop the zucchini and broccoli.

Ready to go!

Once the dough is ready, cut it into smaller pieces.

Smaller pieces are more manageable in the pasta machine.

The beast!

Roll the pasta out to about level three thickness on the pasta machine and then roll it out to level one thickness. The pasta needs to be thin as you will have two layers in some places on the ravioli. Most importantly remember to flour EVERYTHING!!! You do not want to do all of this work just for your pasta to stick together again.

Pasta Sheets (back- number 3 thickness, front-number 1 thickness)

Flour your ravioli maker and place the pasta sheet on top. Spoon about half a teaspoon of your chicken, spinach and ricotta mixture into each hole in the ravioli maker. Brush the joins with a little bit of water and then roll over the pasta with the rolling pin provided in the ravioli maker this will cut the ravioli and you will now have nice pieces of ravioli. Yay!

Finished ravioli.

Now is the time to prepare the sauce. Fry off the garlic and chilli until fragrant. 

Garlic and chilli.

Add the veggies and cook until tender. You can add any veggies you like, I like to add green veggies as I feel like they go best with the lemon sauce.

Fried veggies.

Add the lemon zest and fry off for a few seconds then add the lemon juice and your sauce is ready to go.

 Finished lemon sauce.

 Cook the ravioli in a large pot of salted water for about 7 minutes. or until cooked. 

Cooking the ravioli.

Toss the ravioli through the lemon, chilli sauce until coated. Serve with heaps of parmesan cheese. Enjoy!

Chicken, spinach and ricotta ravioli in a lemon, chilli sauce

Recipe

Ingredients

Pasta

500 g flour

5 large eggs

Ravioli filling

250 g frozen spinach

250 g ricotta cheese

1 chicken breast, diced

1 onion, diced

1 clove of garlic or 1 tsp minced garlic

1/2 cup shredded parmesan cheese

Salt and pepper

Lemon, chilli sauce

2 lemons, zested and juiced

1 tbsp minced chillies or 4 chillies, chopped finely

1 tbsp minced garlic or 4 cloves of garlic finely chopped

2 zucchini, sliced

1 head of broccoli cut into florets

Method

Filling

Saute the garlic, onions, salt, pepper and spinach until soft and the onion is tender. Add the chicken and cook until just cooked. Place the mixture into a food processor with the ricotta cheese and parmesan and process until smooth. Set aside.

Pasta

Measure flour into a bowl, make a well in the centre and place the eggs in the well. Using your hand mix the eggs into the flour gradually mixing in more flour from the sides until you have a ball of dough. Knead the dough on a floured surface for around 20 minutes or until elastic and smooth or when poked it springs back. Cover the dough with plastic wrap or an upside-down bowl and rest for 30 minutes. Cut the dough into smaller pieces and roll out to number three (you will want to start a a thicker setting and the get smaller until you get to number three or you will wreck your machine) with your pasta machine. Layer each piece on top of each other ensuring you flour well in between each piece. Roll each piece of dough through the number 1 setting (thinnest setting) and layer on top of each other again.  

Flour the ravioli maker well. Place one piece of thin pasta onto the ravioli maker. Place half a teaspoon of filling into each hole. Brush in between each ravioli with a little bit of water. Place another sheet of thin pasta on top of your filling and roll with the rolling pin until each ravioli has been cut. Place on a floured plate and make sure you flour in between each layer of ravioli. Set aside until ready to cook.

Sauce

While making the sauce, get a large pot of salted water on to boil. Once boiling, cook the pasta for 7 mins or until al dente. Drain and set aside to add to the sauce.

Fry off the garlic and chilli until fragrant. Add the vegetables (zucchini and broccoli) and cook until tender. Add the lemon zest and fry off for a few seconds. Pour the lemon juice over the vegetables and simmer for 2 minutes.  Add the pasta to the sauce and cook for about 30 seconds, stirring to ensure each piece of pasta is covered in sauce. Serve with lots of shaved parmesan cheese (it's important that it is shaved- it works so much better with this dish that way).

Enjoy!

Have you ever tried to grow a ravioli tree or something like it? 

Dine at Mine September 2013

This year we decided to host a Dine at Mine. Dine at Mine is an event that helps support Camp Quality which is a charity that helps kids with cancer and their families to have a happy and fulfilling life. The idea around the event is that you invite friends over to your house for dinner and they donate the money they would have spent going out to Camp Quality. The whole event was a lot of fun we had to design our menu and decide on what to make and then do some trials and then be ready for the big show on the 7th of September (election day). We ended up having 14 people at our dinner and made a whopping $730 for Camp Quality. 

We decided to do a five course meal comprised of recipes that we love but that we had modified slightly. Below is the menu from our dinner. Appetisers: Deep fried feta stuffed olives, deep fried anchovy stuffed olives, arancini balls with napolitana sauce, bell peppers stuffed with feta, asparagus with garlic aioli. Entree:Homemade chicken, spinach and ricotta ravioli in a lemon, chilli sauce. Consomme: Chicken consomme. Main: Prosciutto wrapped beef scotch fillet with mushroom ragout and mashed potatoes. Sorbet: Lemon and basil sorbet. Dessert: Macaron delice. Tea, coffee and petit fours.

Mr T and I spent the weeks before the dinner getting things ready such as the sorbet which could be made well in advance and the ravioli which we froze a couple of weeks before and then it was finally the day. We had set up the tables the day before so that we could focus on the food during the day. 

The table all set up and ready to go.

When it was just about time to start getting the appetisers ready, my deep fryer decided to blow up and take out the electricity on one side of the house. It left me with a charred finger and a bit shaken up but the guests were arriving thick and fast so we had to make other arrangements and decided to fry everything in pots on the stove which is not as quick as using a deep fryer but it definitely did the trick. The deep fried olives were inspired by something similar we had eaten out at a restaurant called Delissio. The arancini balls were made from our favourite risotto (pumpkin, bacon and mushroom risotto) and the aparagus and peppers were just to have a bit of something fresh on the table. I will post the recipe for the arancini balls at a later date- they were so good with a nice piece of melted mozarella in the centre! Yum!

Mr T and I getting the appetizers ready.

The entree was a pasta dish inspired by a recipe that my ex-housemate (Miss H) taught me- lemon, chilli chicken pasta. This pasta is delicious and in my experience, most people like it. It is tart, spicy and really light. I wanted to use this idea and do it a bit differently so, I decided to make it into a ravioli dish. I put the chicken and spinach into the ravioli with some ricotta and left the zucchini and broccoli in the lemon, chilli sauce and in my book, it turned out great. 

Lemon, chilli chicken ravioli.(Recipe here)

Next was a consomme which is something that Mr T had learnt during his chef's apprenticeship. You first make a stock and then you clarify it with egg whites and add extra flavour with mince and veggies. The main aim with this dish is for it to be clear and boy did Mr T do a great job. I find this soup amazing as it is so full of flavour yet it is such a clear soup. It is a delicate but delicious cleanser. Mr T has promised me a guest post on the recipe for this one so stay tuned.

Consomme.

The main was prosciutto wrapped scotch fillet with mushroom ragout and mashed potatoes. We chose to do the scotch fillet as we both love our steak. The mushroom ragout is a dish that we both adore, it has Swiss brown mushrooms, field mushrooms and button mushrooms in it so it is chunky and so full of delicious mushroom flavour. This time, upon suggestion from my friend Ms H, we put it in the slow cooker to keep it warm for the night- such a great idea. For the Scotch fillet, I first rolled it in finely chopped rosemary and thyme (my favourite herb) and seasoned with salt and pepper. I then laid out the thinly sliced proscuitto with each slice overlapping the next until the row was long enough to wrap the whole fillet. Next I tied it with string and baked it in the  oven. Unfortunately it was ready well before we were so we had to serve it a bit over medium rare. This dish is the only dish that we had not practiced prior to the evening what with it being huge and the piece of meat being worth $70 on it's own. The flavours still turned out fine and meat was still juicy so it was not a complete failure.

Me checking the internal temperature of the meat (the whole thing was huge!!)

The final dish (finished with some broccolini and crispy prosciutto).

For our friend who does not eat beef, we made chicken en papillotte which is chicken breast that is wrapped in baking paper with white wine and vegetables so that it steams itself. The chicken ends up moist and flavourful- a very easy, healthy and delicious dish.

The exciting part of the chicken en papilotte is opening the parcel to see what's inside.

The next cleanser was a lemon and basil sorbet- gosh was it good. The basil just added the extra depth to this sorbet, taking the edge off the sourness from the lemon and adding some great undertones. Unfortunately, I have no photos of this dish to show you but believe me, it was yummy!

Now what you have all been waiting for.....DESSERT!! I made a macaron delice which means macaron delight. This dish was inspired by a dish we tasted at the "A Taste in Time" dinner we had attended earlier in the year with the exceptions that it had mango and raspberry rather that lychee inside and we served ours with a white chocolate, raspberry crunch rather than freeze dried roses, raspberries and dark chocolate.  It was a two large macaron shells sandwiching white chocolate mouse filled with raspberry coulis and mango gel with white chocolate and raspberry crunch on the side. As you get to the middle of the mousse, you reach the coulis and gel which add extra deliciousness to the dish. The crunch was an extra side that added a bit of texture. 

Macaron Delice.

Finally we had tea, coffee and petit fours. The petit fours consisted of chocolate dipped cream cheese mints and palmiers neither of which were photographed on the night. The palmiers are the easiest things to make, you just get packaged puff pastry, sprinkle it with cinnamon sugar and then roll each edge of the puff pastry into the middle, slice it and cook in the oven at 180 oC until browned. Seriously, try it- you know you want to! They are so crunchy and sweet and moreish. Mr T and I polished off the leftovers in no time the next day.

All in all, I think our dinner was a success and everyone had a great time (watching the election coverage). Surprisingly enough, there were very little left overs- only a little sorbet, some palmiers and some cream cheese mints so we must have done a good job. Can't wait to do it all again next year! 

If you are interested in hosting you own dine at mine next year (during September) you can visit the Dine at Mine website to register. Thanks to Dr. Kenny for being our photographer on the night, it was much appreciated.

Have/would you ever catered for a lot of people? 

Feijoa; what is this strange green fruit?

Earlier this year, Mr T and I moved into a new house. We noticed there was a green bush between our place and next door. We didn't take much notice of it except to hope that we wouldn't have to be in charge of pruning it. During late spring/early winter, these bushes started producing these green, oval shaped fruits. I had tried a feijoa the year before and was able to identify what it was. It was not long until we had feijoa coming out of our ears, we didn't know what to do with them and most of them were falling off the bushes, onto the driveway and then getting smooshed by my car when I was backing out. So, I thought "I'll make some jam" and that's what I did.

So what is a feijoa? It's a green, oval shaped fruit that is about the size of an egg. It has a sweet, aromatic flavour whilst also being a bit acidic (it is similar to a pineapple in flavour, in fact it is sometimes called a pineapple guava). The flesh is similar in texture to a pear as it is quite grainy but when ripe, it is also very juicy. The aroma of a feijoa is estery which is attributed to the compound methyl benzoate which is commonly found in the fruit. For this fruit to be produced from the plant, it is necessary for it to experience the winter chill. Due to this reason and the fact that it is resistant to frost, it is a great fruit to be grown in Canberra.

Feijoas!!

Feijoa is also very common in New Zealand (which I learned from MKR a couple of years ago) and the fruit is readily available when it is in season. The feijoa bush is a common plant to be found in New Zealand gardens. 

Cross-section of a feijoa

So with my abundance of feijoas, I set about producing my first batch of feijoa jam. I found the recipe here. It's a page dedicated to feijoa recipes so I might give another recipe a go next year once the feijoas come back. 

Feijoa Jam

Ingredients

500 g feijoas, peeled and sliced (weigh after peeling)

1/2 cup water

500 g sugar

Method

Put the feijoas in a pot with the water and simmer until tender. 

Cooking the feijoas.

This is what they will look like once they are tender.

Mash the fruit with a potato masher and add the sugar. 

Mashed, cooked feijoas.

Add the sugar.

Bring the mixture to a boil over a low heat. Allow to boil until the last drips off a spoon start to set. 

Mmmmmm... Jammy

You can also test it by dropping some onto a plate that you have cooled in the fridge and see if it sets. Pour into sterilised jars. 

Sterilise your jars in the oven at 180 degrees C for at least 30 minutes (make sure you get these in before you add the sugar so that they are ready for your hot jam).

Pour jam into sterilised jars- make sure you don't put hot jam in cold jars or cold jam in hot jars, you may end up with a broken jar due to the difference in temperature.

Now, what to do? To test out the jam, the best test is to put it on scones with a nice dollop of whipped cream, right? Riiiight? 

Mmmmm! Scones with jam and cream.

It certainly passed the test! Yummo! To me, the jam tasted as if I had made pineapples into jam- it was delicious! It was sweet and tart and very tasty. 

For those of you who wish to copy and past the recipe (like I usually do), here it is:

Feijoa jam

Ingredients

500 g feijoas, peeled and sliced (weigh after peeling)

1/2 cup water

500 g sugar

Method

Put the feijoas in a pot with the water and simmer until tender. Mash the fruit with a potato masher and add the sugar. Bring the mixture to a boil over a low heat. Allow to boil until the last drips off a spoon start to set. You can also test it by dropping some onto a plate that you have cooled in the fridge and see if it sets. Pour into sterilised jars. 

Note: It's good to use just under-ripe fruit as it has a higher pectin content which helps the jam set.

What is your favourite jam flavour?

The Wedding Cake Saga Part IV: The Final Product

So, when we last spoke, I left you waiting for the icing and decorating of the cake. Well, the icing for this cake was a Swiss meringue buttercream which has become my favourite type of buttercream and is now my go to for icing cakes. The reasons I love this buttercream is that it's smooth, and light and fluffy and it sets nice and solid. Some buttercream recipes end up with a really gritty mixture which is not really butterCREAM but more like butterPASTE and I really do not enjoy the texture. I feel that this meringue buttercream is a more classy and delicious version of this type of icing (you know the stuff you find on kids birthday cakes). The recipe I use is from Brave Tart and it goes as follows...

Swiss Meringue Buttercream

Ingredients

285 g egg whites (ones from the carton work well and there is no yolks to use up afterwards)

285 g sugar

1/2 tsp salt

900 g unsalted butter, at room temperature and chopped into 2 cm cubes

1 tbsp vanilla extract

Method

Place egg whites, sugar and salt into a heatproof bowl (the bowl of your electric mixer would be good). Put the bowl over a saucepan of steaming water (does not need to be boiling too much but needs to be steaming) and heat to 70°C stirring with a whisk occasionally. The mixture does not need to be whisked too much, it just needs to be stirred enough to ensure that the egg doesn't cook on the sides of the bowl. Once the mixture has reached 70°C, take it off the heat and beat with your whisk attachment until it has cooled (about 15 minutes). Make sure that you test the mixture as well as the bowl when testing the temperature as the bowl will often keep the heat longer than the mixture. Once the mixture has cooled to room temperature, begin adding the butter one piece at a time until it is all mixed in. Once all of the butter has been added, scrape the sides of the bowl to ensure all of the butter is mixed through and add the vanilla essence (taste the icing and add more essence if needed). Your buttercream is now ready to use.

Note: If you don't wait for your egg white mixture to cool properly your butter will melt when you are incorporating it and it can cause issues with your buttercream. The cooling takes a while but it is worth waiting.

 The Kitchen Aid getting a good workout making the buttercream.

So once all of the cakes were cooked, we had to cool them because it's a lot easier to ice a cake when it is cool. Now, Dr. L has a pretty small fridge, so it was fun trying to fit all the cakes in especially since we had held a kitchen tea party a few days before with SO much left over food but we did it (using our awesome Tetris skillz)! 

The fridge with the top three cake layers in it

To prepare the cakes, I first punched a hole into each cake board to make sure that it would sit on the cake plates that I had decided to use for the structural support for the cake.

 Cake board with hole punched in it so that the spike on the cake plate would fit through it

Next, I put icing on the board to hold the cake in place and then I placed each cake onto it's own cardboard cake board (the boards were the same size as the cakes so we would not see them once the cake was on it). Then I iced the cakes using my bakers blade to smooth it all out.

 

 The cake board with icing on it to hold the cake in place

We made the vines for around the cakes out of modelling chocolate. Modelling chocolate is is basically melted chocolate mixed with glucose syrup. I hadn't had many problems with the modelling chocolate recipe before but for this, the modelling chocolate just kept turning out rock hard and near impossible to push through the extruder. It was giving us such a headache (or hand ache from pushing it through the extruder) I started googling what could be going wrong as it had happened with several batches of modelling chocolate. Through this research, I read somewhere that some people add water to their glucose syrup before adding it to the chocolate so we tried it out and it worked a treat- no more rock hard modelling chocolate!! I think due to the difference in altitude between Canberra (approx 571 m) and Adelaide (average approx. 56), the glucose syrup was a lot more viscous in Adelaide which made the resulting modelling chocolate a lot harder. This is my theory on the subject as the temperatures were similar at that time of year. We ended up with enough vines for the cake so that is all that matters. We decorated all of the cakes and then refrigerated them until we could take them to the venue for setting up.

When we got to the venue, they had not been told the cake was coming so weren't prepared to store it so we had to arrange to set the cake up on the day of the wedding. I was not able to do it as, being the maid of honour, I had to go to the salon to have my hair and make-up done so it was left in the hands of my partner Mr T and his helpers Eszrae and Bec who were also partners of people in the bridal party. They did a great job. When they got there, they found that due to the moisture in the cool room (which turned out to be a lot more moist than a normal domestic refrigerator) the vines had started melting so they did their best to soak up all of the drips then assembled it and did a great job. A tip for all of you who decide to make a wedding cake- be careful of your decorations and putting them into a cool room- they may melt!

 Look closely and you will see the melted chocolate vines

In the end, the guys did a great job at assembling the cake and it turned out pretty well (I even got a compliment from the chef saying that it was one of the best he had seen - I was proud). I actually enjoyed making this cake even though it was a bit stressful but the result turned out pretty good! Thank you to everyone who helped out (Lauren, Nikki, Denise, Elise, Bec, Eszrae, Tyson and Louise for the use of her Kitchen Aid). Go team!

I'll leave you with some happy snaps with the cake, thanks to Megan from Emelaine photography... 

 So, that's how you make a four tiered wedding cake... Any questions??? :P

The Wedding Cake Saga Part III: Making the Cake

Well, I'm back and the wedding is all over. It turned out to be a lovely day and pretty much everyone had a good time. Being maid of honour and head baker for the cake was hectic to say the least. But, I had some helpers to make the cake and it all turned out very well. I really appreciated all the extra help we got from others who could spare the time.

I flew from Canberra to Adelaide for the wedding and I had to bring the cake topper with me. So I carried it with me in a container. I also had 9 Kilos of butter that I had purchased from Cost co in my back pack (I bought the butter at Cost co because it was cheaper to get it there than to purchase such huge amounts whilst in Adelaide). It was hard to pick everything up and and to put it all down again so of course, I had to be explosives tested in the airport right after I came through the metal detectors and had just put my bags back on. I went through the metal detector and they scanned my bags (and the cake topper) the guys made the conveyer belt go very slowly so that it would not hurt the topper. Then I got asked all the questions "are you getting married?", " who is this for?", "did you make that?", "how did you make that?" etc. The only question I didn't get asked was the only one I was expecting "what are those 6 large blocks of stuff in your back pack?".  I guess they can tell butter from bricks of drugs or explosives pretty easily. The cake topper was a big conversation starter and most people I came into contact with in the airport and on the plane asked me about it so much so that the lady next to me on the plane and I ended up talking cakes and weddings all the way to Adelaide. Fun times.

So, it took about 5 days to go from a pile of ingredients to a massive, four tiered wedding cake. 

Our giant pile of ingredients

To begin we had to melt all of the chocolate, butter, sugar and water together so that we could let it cool. The first step was to weigh out all of the ingredients (straight into the giant saucepans we were using). Thanks to Dr L's mum who bought her a pretty good scale for her wedding (something that I could never go without nowdays- weighing is so much easier than having to measure with cups) we had the best tools to work with.

 Ingredients all weighed out.

 Chocolate mixture melted. 

 Caramel mixture melted.

Next was the chore of mixing the dry ingredients into the melted chocolate mixture. Needless to say it was quite difficult to mix over a kilo of flour into a thick chocolate mixture, but we did it!

 Mixing the flour into the caramel batter (a very good arm work out!)

Next was to get the batter into the pans that had been lined with baking paper. Because the saucepans, once full were so heavy and I'm pretty short, I could not lift it high enough to pour the batter while it was on the bench so it had to put the pans on the floor and pour the batter in that way.

Pouring the batter into the pans.

Next, it was time to cook the cakes. Luckily enough, Dr L has a really, really wide oven and we were able to bake two at once. 

Baking the cakes (how wide is this crazy oven).

We cooked the smaller cakes on one day and left the biggest cake for the next day as during my practices, I had found that this cake took about 6 hours to cook. In the morning I mixed all the ingredients together and put it in the oven then I left to do other things while Dr L babysat the cake. About halfway through cooking there was a CAKESPLOSION and choc raspberry cake went everywhere in the oven. I guess we had overfilled the pan although, when I trialled it previously it had been fine with that amount of batter (maybe Dr L has more potent bicarb soda :P). 

CAKESPLOSION!!

One change I made to the recipes was that when Dr L asked the Grinch to buy some coffee for the mocha mud cake, he didn't realise it was for the cake and bought caramel flavoured coffee. It was a good mix up as it turned out to be such a delicious cake, I would definitely make it again. As I have mentioned before, the recipe for the chocolate mudcakes was from here. The normal chocolate mudcake omitted the raspberries and the caramel mocha mudcake had a small jar of caramel Moccona coffee added to it (gosh it was sooo gooood).

Caramel mocha and chocolate mudcakes.

Once the cakes were made, It was time to ice them, I will write about the icing and assembly in my next post as this post is already getting quite lengthy. Stay tuned for the grand finale of the wedding cake saga.

Do you have any fun airport stories?