Noodling Around

I’ve had my eye on the Kitchen-Aid pasta roller and cutter attachments for quite some time. And thanks to the generosity of my in-laws, we finally get to enjoy fresh homemade pasta.

Since I had some spicy, peppery arugula from our surprise Persephone Farm delivery, I decided to make some pappardelle noodles with my new toy. We’d made Summer Pappardelle with Tomatoes, Arugula, and Parmesan from Cooking Light before and I decided to adapt it to become a winter dish.

Making the pasta isn’t hard, but it’s time consuming. After initially kneading the dough, it has to rest for at least an hour before you can roll it out. I followed the pasta recipe from Lidia’s Italian-American Kitchen and used Martha Stewart’s Cooking School as a visual guide because it has such lovely step-by-step photos. The recipe called for four eggs, and I had one Persephone Farm egg left, which I used. If you look at the photo of the yolks, it’s easy to spot which one is from a chicken that roams around eating organic grass and bugs. It’s obviously a much richer yellow.  

Rolling the pasta out with the attachment was fun and I was able to do it quickly by myself. I used a pasta cutter that looked like a mini-pizza cutter to make 1-inch wide pasta ribbons. (This cutter also has a fluted-edged cutter that I’ve used for ravioli — and Trevor and my dad have used to seal a window screen, but that’s another story.)

Also, I cut some large pasta squares that I’m drying and will use it to make cannelloni for Valentine’s Day. Lidia’s homemade cannelloni is one of the reasons I wanted to get this pasta roller. I rolled out pasta by hand with a rolling pin for that meal and will never do that again!

Once the pasta was cut and rested, I made the quick sauce. Instead of using out-of-season cherry tomatoes, I used about 1 ½ cups of homemade garden tomato sauce that we usually have in the freezer. And I sautéed the arugula to wilt it slightly. I really can’t say enough about the homemade pasta. It’s completely different from commercially made dried pasta. It was flavorful, silky and light, and really let the flavors in the sauce shine. I don’t think we’ll ever go back to pasta from a box.

Links:

http://find.myrecipes.com/recipes/recipefinder.dyn?action=displayRecipe&recipe_id=10000001572209

The Most Misunderstood Vegetable

I haven’t been posting lately, but I’ve definitely been eating. And fall meals are so delicious. It might be my favorite eating season. We’ve been feasting on Roasted Pumpkin Penne with Autumn Pesto, Butternut Squash Risotto with Pancetta, Eggplant “Meatballs” with Arugula and Shaved Fennel Salad. And Trevor has been making his own salad mix with numerous spicy winter greens.

The fall vegetable from Persephone Farm that we’ve been enjoying the most is one that many people hate: Brussels sprouts. When I posted on Facebook about the delectable Brussels sprouts we’d had for dinner, I got a firestorm of responses. A few people could not believe we found them tasty. But most of my friends professed their love for the cruciferous vegetable.

I think they’ve gotten a bad rap because if they are overcooked they can be downright hideous. I actually never ate them growing up because my mom hated them! I only tried them a few years ago when Trevor brought home a big stalk after his shift at the Farmers’ Market. But treated right, they are splendid!

We followed a recipe from Sheila Lukins and Julee Rosso’s New Basics cookbook. It called for the leaves to be pulled from the Brussels sprouts and lightly sautéed in butter, olive oil and thyme. We’ve found that quartering the sprouts and cutting out the core saves a lot of time and lets plenty of leaves get separated. Which means some of the leaves get a little crispy and brown, and that's the best part.

Other suggestions: Roast in the oven with olive oil, sautée with garlic, crisp up some pancetta then sauté leaves in drippings and add crumbled pancetta to each serving.

Of course, other parts of the meal are important. With my Brussels sprouts I made, a Pancetta Wrapped Pork Roast from a Martha Stewart recipe and some roasted acorn squash also from Persephone Farm. It so good, I made the same meal again a few weeks later for my friend Maureen’s birthday.

So if you have shunned Brussels sprouts in the past, I say put aside old prejudices and give them a second chance. You might discover your new favorite vegetable.

Links:

Pancetta Wrapped Pork Roast

http://www.marthastewart.com/recipe/pancetta-wrapped-pork-roast

Tasteful Economy

The smell of a chicken roasting in the oven is one of life’s simple pleasures. It’s even better when that 4-pound chicken was less than 4 bucks on sale, and you can get several meals from it.

First, I loosely followed Martha Stewart’s guidelines for roasting a chicken. Her book, Martha Stewart’s Cooking School is a great reference for the home cook. However I used a lot more herbs than she calls for. I snipped about 1/3 cup sage, thyme, basil and rosemary from my herb garden. I placed some of the herbs, lemon slices and garlic in the cavity, and stuffed some under the skin, too. I also rubbed some butter on the outside of the skin.

To make a kind of a rack for the chicken to rest on, I cut some celery stalks in half and put them on the bottom of my cast-iron skillet. And to make this a one-pan meal, I quartered some potatoes and a cipollini onion, and scattered them around the chicken. About an hour later, I had a beautiful roast chicken. (But I do admit when we started carving it, we realized it still needed to cook a little longer. But it wasn’t a big deal — I just put it on a baking sheet and put it back in the oven for a few minutes.) And I made some gravy from the pan drippings. For this meal I used Persephone Farm celery, onion, garlic and potatoes.

After we’d enjoyed our chicken dinner, I wrapped up the chicken carcass and put it in the fridge to use to make stock later. As you’ll soon discover, I really, really hate to waste anything.

The next day for lunch, I shredded up chicken breast to make a chicken salad. I’d had one from Trader Joe’s a while ago that I really had enjoyed; luckily I had the ingredients on hand to recreate it. I added chopped fresh rosemary, light mayo, diced dried apricots and diced Persephone celery to the shredded chicken. The apricots and celery added flavor and crunch and stretched out the chicken. I even had enough left to have as a snack on crackers.

For use No. 3 of this roast chicken, I made chicken stock. Making stock is so easy. And it has so many benefits. 1) You save money. 2) You can control the amount of fat and salt. 3) You don’t waste any parts of the chicken. 4) The taste of homemade stock blows away the canned versions. Again Martha Stewart’s Cooking School is a great reference for stock making.

Also, making stock is a great way to use up vegetables and herbs that might be toward the end of their lifespan. If your carrots or celery are a little limp, they’ll still be tasty additions. You can also use parts of vegetables that you’d normally discard, like the dark green parts of leeks. I’d saved a few such items in my freezer and then threw them in my stockpot.

Here’s what I used in my stock today: 3 carrots, spring onion tops, some leek tops, fennel stalks, 4 stalks of celery, ½ a large onion, 6 cloves of garlic, fresh thyme, fresh sage, fresh chives, fresh rosemary, 2 bay leaves, 6 peppercorns, gizzards from the chicken, the chicken carcass, two wings and kosher salt.

I like to add a little olive oil to the pot and brown up the onions, garlic and celery before I add the rest of the ingredients. It just adds more depth of flavor. Once you add the rest of the ingredients, add enough water to cover everything by an inch or so. Then bring it to a boil and skim off any foamy bubbles that appear on top. Then you just lower the heat and let it go at a low simmer for an hour to an hour and a half. You don’t need to do anything to it except skim it if you see more foam. The skimming is important because if don’t do it, you’ll get cloudy stock.

Once I strain out the solids and discard them, I divide the stock between sandwich bags then place them on a cooking sheet and freeze. Once the stock is frozen, I take the bags off the sheet and stack them easily in the freezer. I divide the stock in ½-cup and 1-cup portions, since most recipes call for small portions. The flavor that homemade stock gives to recipes like risotto or soup, or even steamed brown rice is indescribable. I hope you’ll try it soon.