ricotta- & walnut dumplings

I am new to use ricotta in cooking, but I found a recipe that caught my interest, pasta dumplings stuffed with ricotta and walnuts, mouth watering, right?

Since the ricotta was homemade,  it felt like the pasta must be homemade as well,  but the walnuts were purchased. My dear boyfriend had some weeks earlier tried to make his own pasta, so he could be my pasta guru.

The pasta dough was not very complicated to do, to roll it out to sufficiently thin pieces, however, was quite difficult. The dough had it's own will and mostly just wanted to contract, contrary to what I wanted it to do. I believe that there may be an advantage to have a pasta machine. My dumplings tasted very good, but because the pasta was a bit too thick, it was a bit doughy in it's taste.

Ricotta & Walnut dumplings

Ingredients:

½ cup walnuts

about 1 cup of ricotta

1 crushed clove of garlic

1 beaten egg

1 tablespoon fresh sage, finely chopped

Pasta dough

How to:

Chop the walnuts coarsely, or mix them. Add ricotta, garlic, egg and chopped sage and mix well.

Divide the pasta dough into 4 equal pieces. Roll out each piece of dough and punch out a round piece of about 10 cm in diameter, I used a glass. Dispense the mix in the middle of the pasta sheets and brush the edges with water. Fold the pieces into crescent shaped dumplings and press the edges together.

Boil water in a saucepan and add the dumplings. Simmer for about 5 minutes, until they float to the surface. Drain well. Heat the margarine in a frying pan, add the bundles and brown 1 minute on each side

Sagne E Fagioli

The pasta I made in the previous post where made so that I could try this Italian dish that my friend Paolo recommended. The question is whether he just recommend it because it was simple, simple enough for me.

The ingredients for this dish are these:

• Bacon
• Yellow onion
• Borlotti beans
• Crushed tomatoes
• Spices - garlic, black pepper, salt, sugar, oregano
• A little oil
• Pasta

When it comes to spices, so I interpreted it as it is very safe to use the one that falls in the taste. I used the ones I listed above.

Fry the onion and bacon in a little oil, let it sweat.

Bacon and onion.

When the bacon and onions are nicely browned, I add the rest of the ingredients.
The sugar, only one or two pinches, I add in order to get a more rounded tomato flavor to the sauce.

Bacon, onions, garlic, borlotti beans, spices and crushed tomatoes.

Boil some homemade sagne.

Boiling sagne.

When the sauce is ready, and the pasta has been cooked, mix the pasta into the sauce together with a little pasta water. As the picture shows it has the sauce now a looser in texture a bit more like a soup.

Sagne E Fagioli.

And if something feels wrong with the recipe or taste, it is because Paolo said so.

Homemade Pasta - Sagne

My new Italian friend Paolo talked a lot about food with me a few weeks ago when we had knowledge transfer at work. One of the dishes he was talking about was "Sagne e fagioli" that soon will have its own post. But in order to do it so we first need to have sagne which is a pasta variant that is best done by oneself, forcing me to try to make my first homemade pasta ever.

I found an easy recipe for pasta here.

But to complicate things a bit, and maybe because I do not really know how the durum wheat flour behaves so I changed the amounts of flour as follows:

Ingredients for pasta for 4 people.

• 3 dl wheat flour
• 1 dl of durum wheat flour
• 2 eggs
• 2 tbsp of water
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 2 pinches of salt

Mix the flours and make a mountain with a deep crater in. Pour the remaining ingredients into the crater. If it is not big and deep enough it will overflow a bit as it has done in the picture below. Even if it feels like something to get a little panic over it does not matter. It will be fine anyway.

Ingredients for the homemade pasta.

Start by gently mix in more and more flour into the middle. It gets pretty sticky and for a while it may be hard to believe that this will become anything useful. It will apparently take 4-6 minutes to do this but I can not really say that I had any sense of time when I did it.

Pasta dough.

When the pasta dough is kneaded, it shall rest in the fridge for 30 minutes. After that divided it into four parts to make it easier to work with the dough.

Divided pasta after fridge rest.

To have a pasta machine, roll out thin and perfect pasta is probably fun and good but I have none so I have to use a regular rolling pin. It went surprisingly easy down to about 2 mm thickness. After that it became much more difficult.
As the picture shows, I did first longitudinal cut which make tagliatelle, which was about 1 cm wide. After that, in order to get sagne,  I cut the rolled out dough a bit diagonally so that each piece was about 4 inches long.

Flattened and trimmed pasta.

After being rolled and cut some the result was this.

The finished sagne

Cook the pasta for a few minutes. Taste it to see if it is ready.
If the pasta falls when you put it in the water it is ready when it comes to the surface. It was in Paolo advice, so blame him.

Boiling result.

Ricotta

Once again I am experimenting a bit, this time with cheese. I've tried making my own ricotta! When you think about cheese, or at least I,you think about a process that takes a lot of time and that includes lots of different elements, but the ricotta was really quite different than what I expected. It took a little bit longer for me than it should have done because I was unsure if ricotta had begun to curdle or not, but if you follow this recipe, it is possible to hvae your own, homemade ricotta in about 20 minutes and it was incredibly easy.

Ricotta

Ingredients

1 quart whole milk

1/2 cup heavy cream

1/4 cup whole plain greek yogurt

1 1/2 teaspoons lemon juice

1/2 teaspoon kosher salt

Instructions:

In a medium saucepan, add whole milk, heavy cream, greek yogurt, lemon juice and kosher salt, whisking to combine. Bring to a simmer over medium-high heat and cook until the mixture begins to curdle.

While the mixture is warming up, line a colander with a kitchen towel. Set the lined colander over a tall bowl.

Once the mixture curdles, pour into the colander. Let drain for about 5 minutes for a creamier ricotta. Drain for about 15 minutes for a dry ricotta. Transfer the ricotta to an airtight container and store in the refrigerator.

I didn't think my ricotta curdled quite as I expected it to do so I cooked it for about 10 minutes. After 10 minutes, I found that it still didn't curlde, so I took it off the stove and strained it anyway, and to my delight the runny white liquid became ricotta! And a really good one! Recipes using ricotta to come shortly.

Blueberry & raspberry cobbler

I managed to grab me some blueberries, that did not end up in the blueberry jam or the blueberry liqueur, to make a crumble with our blueberries, and raspberries that we got from my mother. It might be blueberry focused on the blog now, but after strawberries, blueberries are my favorite berries, and it always feels good when you know you picked them yourself, even if it meant some pain in muscles you didn't even know you had...

I got some cobbler left-overs because we only where two who would eat the cobbler, and I didn't really feel like adjusting the recipe, but I read that you can freeze cobbler so it went straight into the freezer and will hopefully be a new cobbler another day.

Blueberry & raspberry cobbler

Ingredients for 4-6 persons:

125 g butter

1 1/4 cups flour

1/4 cup granulated sugar

1/4 cup light muscovado sugar

about 1½ cups of berrys

How to:

1. Preheat the oven to 225 degrees C.

2. Mix flour and sugar in a bowl. Part the butter into cubes and mix it with your fingers in the flour and sugar mixture until it forms a crumbly dough.

3. Grease a pie dish, add the berries and sweeten with some sugar.

4. Spread the crumble over the berries and bake the pie for about 20 minutes until golden.

I served the pie with some whipped custard

Rye & spelt flour bread

Here comes another bread made using poolish, but this time with rye and spelt flour. Now I am even closer to get started with sourdough baking again, and feel inspired to do it too. I've actually started both a sourdough and a wild yeast.

I baked this bread a couple of weeks ago and since then I haven't made any bread at all but now I feel the urge to bake bread come back again and then it will be nice to have a finished sourdough and wild yeast in a few days so that I can make some proper bread.

Rye and spelt flour bread with poolish

Ingredients 1 part:
200 g water
300 g rye flour
200 g of spelled
5 g of yeast and 50 g of active sourdough

To do this:

Heat the water to 35 degrees C. Dissolve the yeast with a whisk. Add the rye and spelt flour and whisk together to form a thick pancake-like batter. Cover the bowl with plastic and allow the mixture to ferment  for between 3-6 hours at room temperature or overnight in refrigerator.

Ingredients 2 part:

15 g yeast
25 g
1 egg
200g plain flour
200 g rye flour
20 g salt

Add all the ingredients, except the salt. Work the dough for about 13 minutes. Then add the salt and work the dough for another 7 minutes.
Place the dough in a slightly oiled bowl and cover it with plastic, and let rise for 60 minutes. After 30 minutes, press the dough out again by using your fingers, so that the air bubbles collapse.
After the first fermentation bake the dough to a bread, which is laid on a floured cloth, covered over and let  rise for another 60-90 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 250 degrees C. Turn out the dough gently on sheets with baking parchment.
Inject a little water in the oven and after 5 minutes, reduce the temperature to 200 degrees C.
Vent the oven door after 10 min, then a second time after 20 min. Bake the loaves additional 25 minutes. Total cooking time: 60 minutes.

Blueberry jam

After the test with blueberry liqueur, it's time to do something a little more serious with a bigger portion of the blueberries that are left (a lot of berries must be saved for the tarts later in the winter). An obvious option for me then becomes blueberry jam although I've never done it before.

Hard, sweet blueberry jam.

Crucial to the amount of marmalade can be made is how much berries you have. I chose to just use 500 gram because it is easy to calculate, many other recipes based on 1 kg of blueberries.

Almost 500 grams of blueberries.

The ingredients of the blueberry jam are:

• 500 grams of blueberries
• 400 grams of gelling sugar / sugar with pectin
• juice of half a lemon 

The ingredients, blueberries, gelling sugar and a half lemon.

Boil the berries in a pot and then pour in sugar and let both boil. When the sugar has begun to melt the lemon juice is added. After that I let it cook on low heat for 30 minutes.

The blueberries starts to boil.

Pour the finished jam into sanitized jars with lids and cool them quickly afterward. I chose to put them in a water bath with lukewarm water.

Cool the finished jam quickly.

Next time I make blueberry jam, I will try to cook it only half as long. Although the taste is wonderful as it is now, it's consistency is a little too hard and I felt that much boiled away. I will check consistency after only 15 minutes to see if it works well.

Blueberry jam.

Cupcakes with elderflower frosting

Now I have finally used my elderberry juice for anything other than to drink it. I made cupcakes with elder flower frosting! It feels very good to use something you've made ​​yourself to something beyond its main use. Although I am not the person refusing a glass of elder flower lemonade, it is unfortunately not something I drink all that often, so it feels great that I can use the lemonade as a flavoring for anything else so it does not stand in the fridge untapped.

Cupcakes:
½ cup (113 g) unsalted butter, room temperature
2/3 cup granulated white sugar
3 large eggs
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1½ cups all prupose flour
1½ teaspoon baking powder
1/4 cup milk
a pinch of salt

How to:
Preheat the oven to 175 degrees C. Beat eggs, sugar and vanilla white and very fluffy. Melt butter, add the milk and mix it with the egg mixture. Mix flour, baking powder and salt and carefully mix it into the batter. Place muffin tins on a baking sheet and fill them 2/3 full with batter. Bake in center of oven for about 15 minutes.

Elder flower frosting:

140 g butter
200g icing sugar
3 tablespoons concentrated elderflower lemonade

How to:
Beat butter and icing sugar until soft and fluffy. Mix in elderberry juice and mix some more.

Blueberry Liqueur

Now that we have been out in the woods collecting blueberries, it's time to use a small part to try new strange things. Here I found a recipe for blueberry liqueur. The question is if it sounds more exciting than it is.

Beginning of blueberry liqueur.

In the original recipe there was syrup, but the person who created it did not like it so I exchanged it all for sugar. Which gives this recipe:

• 460 grams of blueberries
• 420 grams of sugar
• 1000 grams of vodka

With much less blueberries so I had to recalculate the recipe:

• ~ 200 grams of blueberries
• ~ 183 grams of sugar
• ~ 435 grams of vodka

Almost 200 grams of blueberries

Everything measured, almost 435 grams of vodka.

 Use a sanitized glass jar and start by putting in the blueberries. Then the sugar and finally the vodka.

Blueberries in the clean jar.

Blueberries and sugar, and a glimpse of the vodka.

When the vodka is in the can I put it on the window sill with the lid shut. The bottle is not completely full, so it should be fine even if it gets hot in the window.

Everything in place.

The plan now is to wait 2 months before it's time to strain out the berries and put the liqueur in bottles. However, I will shake the jar somewhat from time to time so that the sugar dissolves faster.

Tortano bread

The past weekend  we had decided to try our luck in the blueberry forest with some friends, but before that we needed lunch. I love bread with a filling so therefore I threw together three kinds tortano breads. Bread is really grateful to be filled with different things because almost everything tastes delicious with bread. At this time I focused hard on the cheese and had different cheeses in the three different breads.

It was a pretty good idea to have something to eat before we went into the woods. After about three hours,  me and my boyfriend had managed to pick almost five liters of blueberrys. I noticed, however, the day after that my legs were not really trained to squat for three hours, I still have some pain in my thighs.

Tortano

Ingredients:

15 g fresh yeast

300 ml lukewarm water

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 tablespoon honey

1½ tablespoons sea salt

175 g durum wheat flour

275 g strong bread flour

How to:

1. Crumble the yeast into a mixing bowl and dissolve it in the water, olive oil, honey and sea salt.
2. Mix in the flours a little at a time; knead until the dough becomes elastic.
3. Let it rise in a bowl undeer a cloth, until it doubles in size, about 40 minutes.
4 Press the dough into a rectangle shape about 1 cm thick. Don't roll it because the air will be pressed out of the dough.
5. Fill the dough with the filling of your choice (See below for inspiration).
6. Brush the edges of the dough with water and roll it into a long sausage shape, then shape into a wreath.
7. Preheat the oven to 250 degrees C.
8. Place the bread on a tray lined with baking parchment, flour the bread and let it rise under a cloth for about 30 minutes.
9. Put the tray in the oven, and lower the temperature to 200 degrees C. Bake for around 35 minutes and let the bread cool on a cooling rack before slicing.

Tortano with goat cheese, honey and walnuts:

1 set tortano
200 g of hard goat cheese
150 g walnuts
2 tbsp runny honey

Tortano with feta cheese, olives and rosemary:

1 set tortano
200 g feta cheese
1/3 cup olives, pitted
3 sprigs fresh rosemary
Olive oil to drizzle.

Tortano with mixed cheeses, herbs and garlic:

1 set tortano
350 g mixed cheeses (I used: hard goat cheese, feta cheese and brie cheese)
3 sprigs of rosemary
5 sprigs of thyme
2 cloves garlic, pressed
1 pinch of salt flakes
Olive oil to drizzle.

Cumberland Style Sausage

Earlier this spring I went to a sausage course at Taylor and Jones, all participants got a bag full of sausages to bring home but mine is finished now, so it is time to try to make my own sausage at home.

After looking at a lot of recipes and "making sausage" websites and books, it feels like that you can complicate the recipe a lot. I will start by making simple recipes with few ingredients and no fresh ingredients that can easily become bad.

My thought when I started thinking about what kind of sausage I would like do was that the meat should be approximately 20% fat. It's a good question if I got that much or not, as shown below, it was some at least some fat in the piece of meat.

Another good question is which cut it is in English. In Swedish it is called fläskkarré that is roughly translated to pork loin or tenderloin which I am unsure if it is correct. It is called the collar here and is part number 4 in this wikipedia page where the cuts differ a lot from the English version.

Reasonably beautifully tied sausages.

Ingredients for Sausage:

1.2 kg collar/pork loin in bits (some is lost in the meat grinder)

2 dl bread crumbs

2 dl water

1 tablespoon salt

1 tablespoon white pepper

1 teaspoon sage

1 teaspoon nutmeg

1 teaspoon marjoram

Bit of collar/pork loin, about 1.2 kg.

Discs of the meat showing the amount of fat.

Here are the sliced meat ​​but it must be cut into smaller pieces, like cubes, before it is easy to grind them in a hand-powered meat grinder.

Meat grinder after usage.

It was a bit sticky with meat grinder, it became more so since I did not have a bowl that was low enough to go under the meat grinder.

Minced meat, water, bread crumbs and spices.

When the meat is minced put it and everything else in a large bowl with plenty of room for processing. The important thing here is that the various ingredients are evenly distributed, it will not be fun if the breadcrumbs stick together and forms small balls.

Something for the chef.

If you are unsure about the seasoning or if it's your first time you try a new sausage recipe, you can fry a small piece of sausage meat to taste it.
Or they do it anyway so the chef gets a small piece.

Finished sausages.

After the sausage is filled it is time to bind it. My idea was to bind it like this. You can argue if I managed to do it equally good, I think have to practice a bit more.