Saturday 27 May - Vincisgrassi

I bought a new book last week, called The DIY Cook by Tim Hayward. It caught my eye, and as it was cheap I picked it up to have a read. It turned out to be just the sort of cooking I love - making all the components of a recipe from scratch. I spotted this recipe for Vincisgrassi, which is essentially a lasagne, but a bit more special. The pasta element is so easy now that we have an attachment on our kitchen aid, that this didn't seem too daunting to start with. The main components were a slow cooked ragu, and a mushroom bechamel, plus the homemade lasagne noodles. A main ingredient in the recipe was truffles, which unsurprisingly are not available in Gosport at any time of year - however, I was given a jar of Black Truffle paste for Christmas, so it was an excuse to open that.

The ragu started with a sofrito of carrot, celery, onions and pancetta, fried slowly in butter and olive oil.

The meat was a mix of beef and veal mince, fried quickly in a hot dry pan - red wine,garlic, cinnamon and cloves were added and the wine was boiled down.

The meat and soffrito were combined, along with a small amount of tomato paste, and some fresh chicken stock, and it was left to simmer gently for three hours before finishing with some double cream.

For the bechamel sauce, some dried ceps were added to warm milk until they were soft, they were then drained, chopped and fried off with some fresh chopped button mushrooms to drive off all the water.

The mushroomy milk was made into a bechamel sauce, and the chopped mushrooms added back into this with some seasoning.

Then for the assembly.

First a layer of pasta, topped with a thin layer of ragu

Then more pasta, parma ham, some of the bechamel, parmesan and fresh mozzarella, and some of the truffle paste.

Finishing with sauce and cheese as the top layer, this was then baked until golden and hot.

I made a garlic and rosemary bread to serve with this

The only other thing we needed was a fresh green salad. We had enough left over to freeze for another day. This was a recipe I really enjoyed cooking, and was certainly worth all the effort.

Saturday 6 May - Gumbo

Every so often I realise how few recipes I am adding to this blog, but we tend to be creatures of habit, and often eat the same, or similar dishes so it's not often that we cook something completely new. I was browsing facebook yesterday, and an article popped up by Yotam Ottolenghi, about Gumbo. His recipe didn't greatly appeal to me, as there was no okra in in, but it gave me the idea to have a read up, and to try and make some. As an added bonus, it was a beautiful day, so we took the ferry over to Portsmouth where I knew I'd be able to buy some Okra. While we were there I also bought some plantains and Scotch Bonnet chillies so we can make Jerk chicken for tonight.

As we needed to make a chicken stock, I bought a couple of whole chickens - we jointed them, saving the breasts for tomorrow, the legs and thighs for the Gumbo, and everything else went into the stock pot.

I read up on lots of recipes, and the main things that make a gumbo are the roux, and also the basic 'Holy Trinity' of Cajun cooking, celery, green pepper and onions. I decided that in this instance I needed to overcome my fear of cooked celery as it is vital in this dish.

For seafood I bought raw prawns, and also added some tiny dried prawns, chopped up very small. Polish sausage is the easiest to find here so thats what we used for the smoked sausage.

As I was about to start cooking, I realised that many of the recipes mentioned Ancho Chilli powder, which I didn't have - a bit of googling thought made me realise I could make my own by grinding up Ancho chillies in a coffee grinder (although I would recommend NOT putting your contact lenses shortly after doing this..)

The sliced sausage was fried, and then removed from the pan, and then the flour was added to make a roux. This had to be cooked and stirred until quite brown.

Then in went the chopped vegetables, chilli powders, tabasco and then the okra, which was sliced up to release the sticky edges

Then the fresh chicken stock was stirred in, and the whole chicken pieces were added.
Once cooked, the meat was removed, and stirred back in, along with the smoked sausage and raw prawns.

 

This was served over boiled basmati rice. Absolutely delicious, and will certainly make it again but maybe try some different seafood next time.