Category: Italian food

Quick ravioli

“Lucky” store in Isumi not only sales wines, sakes and rare whisky (they still have some aged Hibiki, which is quite rare to find now), they also sale a few local products with a small stall of cheeses. So while A. browses the liquor shelfs, I usually check the local cheeses from a tiny cheese factory. I like their ricotta, their cottage cheese and the sort of dried mozzarella they make. More than often the shelf is rather empty… but last time I got lucky as there was some ricotta. Ricotta… hum… together with the spinach season starting… that means ravioli!!!

I planned to do them on Saturday night originally but I got busy and wanted to sleep early before my first bodyboard contest, meaning waking up before sunrise… so ravioli making was postponed… until last night when A. was having meetings until rather late so I had a bit of time to cook.

The longest wave I’ve ever ridden and got the highest score with in the first round of the contest!!

But I had not too much time either, so it had to be quick… and in Tokyo my kitchen is tiny and my pasta machine is in Isumi so it would be hand rolled pasta… I also realized I was out of eggs so that would be vegan pasta, a bit more difficult to roll, adding to the challenge. I decided that paper thin pasta would be for another time, so I prepared something almost like some Russian pelmeni… It was truly delicious!!! So here is my recipe below, enjoy!

Quick ravioli (2 servings)

For the vegan pasta

  • 100g of flour
  • 2tbs of olive oil
  • A bit of water

For the filling

  • 100g of fresh ricotta
  • A few bundles of spinach
  • A handful of walnuts
  • Salt and pepper

Mix the flour and the oil, add a bit of water and knead to obtain a smooth dough. Add water if needed drop by drop. This shouldn’t take more than 10min to make. I did it between two meetings!!! Let to rest for 1h or 2 under a moist cloth. That gives time to work a little longer!!!

For the filling, wash the spinach and blanched them. Drain very very well. In a bowl mix with the ricotta, salt and pepper. Squeeze the walnuts as fine as possible, and to the mix, and stir well.

30min before dinner time, roll the dough of a surface tipped with flour. Set about a tea spoon of filling for one ravioli. Save a tbs of filling for the sauce. Cover with a layer of dough, close and cut the ravioli. Cook a large pan of boiling water. In the meantime in a frypan add olive oil and the leftover filling, stir. When the ravioli are boiled move them to the pan without draining them properly, and cook them two more minutes in the pan, covering them well in the sauce. Serve and eat! You can add a bit of freshly grated parmegiano.

Edamame and eggplant

Whether on weekdays, when we have little time to have lunch or on the weekends when we are busy with surfing/bodyboarding, playing tennis or gardening, having a good lunch easily ready is important. Moreover, if that can be prepared in advance it is even better! Fresh pasta have been quite a good candidate as they can be accommodated easily, be eaten warm or cold… and since it it is the end of the summer we want to continue enjoying the summer vegetables a little longer, in particular, enjoy the last edamame of the season. I know that we will have eggplants and tomatoes for quite a few weeks or even months but they add a real summer touch to a dish. So I came up with a recipe of edamame pasta with eggplant that is all creamy and divine and I couldn’t wait sharing that recipe with you, as if you want to try you’ll have to hurry!

Edamame, fava beans, and similar are a good match with eggplants and are traditionally used together in Japanese cuisine. I revisited this classic combination in a more western style.

Edamame and eggplant creamy pasta (2 servings)

  • a handful of edamame
  • 2 eggplants
  • fresh pasta
  • olive oil
  • salt and pepper
  • grated Parmigiano (optional)

Boil the edamame, grill the eggplants to be able to peel them. Once the edamame have cooled down peel them completely and in a mortar puree them. Add a bit of olive oil, salt and pepper. Peel the eggplant and add to the mix and pure roughly. Boil the fresh pasta, once drained add the mix, stir well ad serve. Add grated Parmigiano if you like.

Yes! that’s it! Isn’t that simple? And you’ll see it is truly delicious!

Gnochetti

When I make pasta for ravioli I always end up with a significant amount of pasta that has been floured and roll and is unsuitable for making ravioli again. It has become to dry. Usually I would just keep it that way, cut in squares and boil it or fry it as a little bonus or for finger food with a drink. But recently I have been really attracted to making shorter pasta like troffie, orecchiette, gnochetti… and seeing video of Scusatema on IG really inspired me to make the step and test… the ravioli rolled pasta is a lot drier and hard than the original pasta and I thought it would be perfect for the test. I have little cooking equipment, and thought my little gnocchi board would be good for that.

So I assembled all the remaining pasta in a ball, rolled it in a long stick.

Cut the stick in small pieces, and started rolling them on the board. That went just perfectly. No meed for additional flour, no sticky parts and beautifully shaped gnochetti came out one after the other. Bonus it is super relaxing to do this little gesture to roll the pasta on the board and see them pilling in front of me.

Since I made only a small amount instead of boiling them I cooked them in a little pan with olive oil and a bit of water, and waited for the water to go before lightly frying them, and served them as a little snack.

For sure I will make short pasta again soon! That was so nice!!

Edamame ravioli

Every week, I am hoping for a more quieter week and every week day is getting busier and I end up with very very little time to cook… for example today my lunch was some raw carrots, a piece of Comte cheese and some nuts… as I rushed between meetings and things to do. It is also often a bowl of rice topped with something rapidly cooked (more coming about that soon). So when I manage to have just a little more time to cook I jump on the occasion and I cook some more fancy things. “Fancy” being almost exaggerated!!
The season for edamame is starting now and I got some from the farmers market, which I was thinking I would just boil for a quick use in salad or with rice but then I had this little window of time for cooking and I was all set for making edamame gyoza, but then thought that as delicious it seems, it would be almost too conventional in traditional Japanese flavors, so I decided to opt for the Italian version: ravioli!!!

While making ravioli takes a little bit more time, it is so rewarding and we love them so much that it is always worth eating a bit late!!! For this edamame ravioli, I mixed in the filling the edamame and some pork meat and I dressed them simply with olive oil, salt and pepper. Here is my recipe.

Edamame ravioli

  • 100g of flour (I used whole wheat here)
  • 1 egg
  • a bit of water
  • 100g of ground pork meat
  • 200g of edamame
  • Salt, pepper olive oil

Prepare the pasta by mixing, as usual, the flour, the egg and a bit of water. Knead well and keep for 30min.

Boil the edamame. Once cooled down, shell them and remove the skin as much as possible. In a mortar puree them roughly (as on the above picture). In a frypan cook the pork meat then mix with the edamame. Add salt and pepper. Keep the frypan as it is.

Roll the pasta. Fill the ravioli and close them. Boil a large pan of water and boil the ravioli. When they float move them to the frypan with half a ladle of cooking water. Add olive oil a bit and cook 2min before serving and enjoying immediately.

Stuffed bread

This all started with a picture that I saw on my IG feed one morning from Jul’s kitchen. I’ve been following her for quite some time now. Her recipes always make me want to be in Tuscany and when two years ago (whoa… It seems like ages ago!!!) we actually were thinking about moving to Florence and went there repeatedly I asked her recommendations about places to shop delicious things in Florence and they were gold. Well, just to say that her blog makes me dream of Tuscany… so… back to that picture I saw very likely on my way to work, last winter I guess… it was a savory stuffed pastry… it looked wonderful and I thought about doing some for a long time, but every strictly new recipe requires to mature in my head and to find the proper timing of ingredients and preparation. It’s only the other day that the winter vegetables started to be back in particular the cabbages, the spinaches and that I bought some pork ribs.

All was finally there to make the stuffed bread. But instead of a pastry dough or a brioche I decided to go with some straight white flour bread dough. The result was a very very delicious and warm meal, perfect for a rainy evening like today. Here is my recipe.

Stuffed bread (2 generous portions)

– 150g of flour

– 10g of salt

– 5 g of yeast

– water

– 1/2 small Chinese cabbage or 1/4 large

– a bundle of spinach

– 150 of pork ribs thinly sliced (豚バラ)

– pepper

– sesame seeds

Prepare the bread dough 1 or 2h before hand: mix the flour, the salt, the yeast, add water little by little and knead until the dough is soft and smooth. Leave to rest in a warm place under a moist cloth for 1 or 2 hours.

In the meantime, in a frypan cook the meat until golden. Wash and pat dry the vegetables.

Roll the dough with a pin, set the meat in the middle, top with the vegetables. Add some pepper. Fold the dough and close it. Flip the bread to have it upside down. Top with sesame seeds. Leave for proving about 30min and then bake at 230deg for 18min. Serve hot!

Butternut squash ravioli

It’s been a while I didn’t make pasta! It was too hot and the summer vegetables don’t go to well for making ravioli filling. But now that autumn is here, hey! Hey! It’s time to get the pasta machine out and roll some pasta!!!

As the title indicates, I made butternut squash ravioli. It’s not my first time of course, and you can find different recipes already here and here, but this time I decided to try making tiny ravioli and add some spices: nutmeg and cinnamon, and a bit more salt and pepper than usual. And serve them with roasted pine nuts and olive oil… and you know what? It was delicious!!! The cinnamon adds a really nice twist of sweetness and is much better than just the nutmeg alone. So here is the filling recipe and the sauce, for the pasta just as usual…

Butternut squash ravioli

For the filling:

– 1/2 butternut squash

– 1 pinch of nutmeg

– 1/2 tsp of cinnamon

– a pinch of salt

– freshly ground pepper

For the sauce:

– a handful of pine nuts

– olive oil

Boil or steam the butternut peeled.

Drain well and remove all the water, seeds and fibers. Let cool down. Add all the other ingredients and stir well. Fill the ravioli.

In a frypan roast the pine nuts.

Boil the ravioli, dress the plates with ravioli, pine nuts and a bit of olive oil. That’s it!!!

Panisse

Probably very few of you know what panisse are… you only know if you’ve been to Provence long enough or have a specific interest in regional cooking… Panisse are an other traditional recipe based on chickpea flour and that cones from Italy apparently, but is also famous as far as Marseille. I’ve already shared the recipe of socca from Nice, panisse are something different. They are thicker and fluffier. Most recipes I’ve found are just using the same ingredients as socca but cook it in a pan with a lot more water, and then wait for it to cool down before frying them. I wasn’t too happy with these recipes and tried one I found in one of my vegetarian cookbook. The reason I was interested in that recipe is because you need to add a bit of baking soda to the mix… and you can cook it immediately and eat it immediately too. I still cooked it in a frypan like the socca but it resemble a giant fluffy pancake.

So here is my recipe.

Panisse

– 100g of chickpea flour

– a pinch of salt

– 1tbs of olive oil

– 1tsp of baking powder

– water

In a bowl mix all the ingredients and add water little by little until the mix is thick but not dry.

Heat a frypan of 15cm diameter, grease slightly with olive oil, pour the mix and cook at low heat, under cover, until it’s almost dry on top. Flip, and cook 2more minutes. Cut and eat!

You can use a lot more oil when cooking the panisse, but this is not mandatory… you can also add a bit of salt after too… enjoy!

Pizza!!!

I don’t know why, but quiche and pizza are two things I could eat anytime. Winter, summer, with fresh seasonal vegetables, it’s always happiness in my plate!!!

Recently I haven’t kneaded much… week days are all too busy and weekends none the less but with different activities and more to come as our construction is almost finished and now I will have fun thinking about the new garden. 24h is way too short to do all I want to do!

I love to prepare pizza with the local products from Isumi, with all the cheese farms around making mozzarella, the local tomatoes and the variety of fresh vegetables, there is always something to put on your pizza to make it fancy. In the full summer heat now, okra are a nice option and they are particularly good when baked. Adding some fresh radish tops as the rucola season is over and you have a perfect summer pizza.

For the dough I always use the recipe from the Kayser bread book. But now that I know that I can speed up the kneading without affecting too much the result, I cam prepare pizza dough in no time. It’s simple, never fails and with the room temperature at 27-28 now it rises in 45min, so no need to plan too long ahead… so there will be more pizza coming soon I’m pretty sure!

What do you like on your pizza??

Handkerchief pasta…

The other day on my instagram feed I got surprised by a beautiful pasta. The art of plating IG feed had this “handkerchief pasta” picture of flowers rolled between two layers of lasagna. The result was for sure beautiful. And since it’s been some time I didn’t roll pasta it was a good time to try. Though fresh flowers surely make a very colorful and elegant plate, usually I find that the flavor is very thin or inexistant, except for chrysanthemums and a few other few flowers. So I wasn’t going to try flowers. Rather leaves. Indeed, I had a bit of jute mallow and I was thinking of making lasagna or cannelloni. I opted for cannelloni as I could use different filling for mine and A.’s. The filling for A’s was jute mallow and grilled salmon, mine had an addition of cream cheese.

But let’s get back to this handkerchief pasta… it all starts like a normal pasta or lasagna, that I rolled with my mercato to the thinest level: 9. I washed the jute mallow, removed the hardest and thickest parts, then set the leaves on on a piece of lasagna, cover with another one and roll two size thicker: 7. The result is quite interesting! The leaves rolled in the pasta machine and trapped between the lasagna extend significantly! The result was really nice, but I made a few mistakes:

  1. I rolled the pasta too thin, 8 would have been better, to have a stronger pasta
  2. Rolling 3 size down rather than 2 would have avoid to stretch the leaves so much and to have the pasta cut along the hardest parts of the leaves.
  3. Put a lot more leaves, and much smaller ones.
  • Otherwise it was quite easy and straightforward to make and the result was really beautiful. I think the lasagna would have been a better choice in the end.
  • Jute mallow and salmon, dressed with olive oil was a great combo!!
  • I’ll try again for sure rolling lasagna with decorations!!

    • Close up on the leaves enclosed in the pasta, and the cut from rolling to thin…

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