Spontaneous Food

What are we going to have for dinner??? This question pops into my head at some stage on most days. I am rarely a cook who has dinner all planned out with ingredients waiting happily at home in their rightful place. Unlike my mum, who has always maintained her household like a tight ship, with a weekly shop providing all the food necessary for every dinner. “Don’t touch that, it’s for dinner tomorrow night..........Have a piece of fruit”, Mum had constant battles with her 5 fridge-raiding kids over the years. Perhaps it is because I do not have these 5 kids, that I don’t yet have to go to these measures. I’m not so sure though.

One thing I have learned though is that there are some people that need a recipe and those that never follow a recipe. And I guess I fall into the latter category, because even when I do have a recipe I will change it slightly, or substitute it until it barely looks like the picture. I look at recipes as providing the backbones for the different techniques of cooking and inspiration for different flavour combinations. And when you look at food in this manner, the options are endless and your kitchen becomes your own private restaurant.

So it is most probably this way that I look at food that has caused me to be such the disorganised home cook. Thus, I have become very good at quickly scanning in my brain the fresh ingredients on hand, with which to match together and conjure something tasty, something satisfying. It is all about developing the skills to cook, the knowledge of what will work together and the energy to try something new. I think it is a lifelong process.

And so, tonight’s dinner came about in this manner, so I thought to share it. It is home-made pumpkin ravioli with sage brown butter. I started with the feta that had been opened last week and needed to be used and the pumpkin that I had been craving for a few days now. Combine these with the parmesan, pine nuts, fresh eggs and flour that I always have in my kitchen and the sage in the garden and there you have dinner in a flash.

Home-made pasta
I could write and write about my passion for home-made pasta. All I am going to say now is that it is so simple and quick to whip up in minutes and is one of my life’s most simple pleasures. It did take persistence to get to this point though, with many failed attempts and finally a quick lesson from my sister who had been taught by an Italian friend.

I won’t go into detail about making or rolling the dough in this blog but I will mention my recipe for the dough. With so many recipes out there it is so confusing. Out of all, I have found this dough, from the Italian friend, to be the easiest, the most reliable, the tastiest.

Per person
1 egg
1/2 cup flour
Make the dough and roll out to the thinnest setting

Pumpkin and feta filling
I combined the following:
About 2 cups steamed pumpkin, mashed and cooled
A handful of pine nuts, roughly chopped
200g crumbly feta, (not the soft Persian)
A matchbox sized piece of parmesan, finely grated
1 tablespoon sage finely chopped.
Cracked black pepper and salt to taste

I made fairly large ravioli. This quantity only made about 25 for me.

While you are poaching the ravioli, place a small frying pan over high heat. Add a generous knob of normal salty butter per person. Cook until starting to brown. Add a handful of sage leaves per person and continue to cook until butter is nut-brown and sage is crisp. You can add a drop of olive oil to the pan if it gets to the right colour but the sage isn’t crisped yet. This prevents further cooking from burning the butter completely.
Serve ravioli with the sage butter, grated parmesan and pepper cracked pepper

That yummy breadcrumb pasta

I’m taken back to Umbria today with a food craving for a dish cooked for my husband and I at a Bed and Breakfast last September. On two of the three nights we stayed there, they welcomed us into their home to enjoy their cooking - have some ‘real’ food as I think of it. This type of experience for me is something quite special, as having home-made food can really change your perceptions of the food culture of a country. For me, the food was so much about family and history, recipes carefully handed down through the generations. Recipes taught to grand-daughters to pass onto their children. And you get the sense that everything they eat is designed to be able to be made in masses to feed a crowded table.

This particular craving that seizes my attention today is for a dish I like to describe as one of those little gems; something that completely shocks and delights your senses, something you did not expect, and something new to your repertoire. The food in craving is called Passatelli, a delicious ‘breadcrumb’ pasta, spaghetti-like in shape, but made from breadcrumbs, parmesan and egg, rather than the common flour and egg mix. I had never even known this to exist and it really has to be eaten to be understood. It is everything about comfort food, dense tender pasta bites with a gorgeous parmesan salty flavour. Teamed with the freshness and vitality of sautéed zucchini, bursting cherry tomatoes, sage, garlic and the essential fruity extra virgin olive oil, it is transformed to a robust and satisfying pasta course.

So after a little web research I came across this formula for Passatelli. The Passatelli strands are traditionally made in a passatelli maker, but a potato ricer will the do the job fine, using the largest holes. There is something very satisfying about using one of these little gadgets. And it is so quick and easy to plop them straight into the boiling water, far less time consuming than egg and flour pasta. I did find I had to add a little water to the dough to form a softer dough, more easily able to be squeezed through the ricer.

The recipe for the sauce I have made from memory of the dish was back in Umbria, and in fact is a sauce I have made before today to go with spaghetti or home-made pappardelle. It is the ultimate fast food, as the sauce can be whipped up in the time it takes to cook the pasta.



For each person:
1 egg
50g breadcrumbs
50g parmesan
1 teaspoon flour

The sauce for 2:
1 punnet cherry tomatoes
1 medium zhuccini cut into quarters lengthways and then sliced into about 1cm pieces
1-2 cloves garlic, smashed but left whole
10-15 sage leaves
Extra virgin olive oil
Shaved parmesan to serve

For the dough
Knead all the ingredients together and let it rest for about an hour. Put the dough through a potato ricer, and press it into long strings, cutting them into lengths about 10-15cm as you go along. Drop the strands into some boiling ater and let it cook for 4-5 minutes. Serve immediately, tossed through the sauce.

The sauce
In a pan, drizzle in some extra virgin olive oil and throw in the garlic. Place over a hot stovetop and when heated, add the zucchini and sauté until golden. Add the sage and cherry tomatoes and continue to sauté adding a generous cracking of black pepper, salt and a tiny sprinkle of sugar to taste. Douse with more extra virgin olive oil. Toss through cooked passatelli and serve at once, scattered with parmesan.



THE VERDICT? Well, I think passatelli making will just have to be a work in progress. The first attempt, just as it was for my pasta and gnocchi making experiences, was less than satisfactory. It was encouraging though, with all the right flavour and strands that held together just fine. I think that mastering the art of pasta-making has to be a labour of love and persistence. So, although my first batch barely stood up against those tender tendrils I first experienced, I shall persist in the pursuit for passatelli perfection.