Today was the first real nice day to be outside this year. The temperature finally went into the double digits this week (not every day) but besides wednesday, when I was stuck in the office all day, the sun really hadn’t come out. Today – however – was sunny. Very sunny. Waking up with the sun peeping through the curtains was wonderful, so we decided to go outside. We went to the woods. (Het Amsterdamse Bos – Amsterdam forest – was planted in the 1920′s and gave 1000 people 5 years of work.) L has recently bought a new lens for his camera and this was a wonderful day to test it out.
Walking around in fresh air made us hungry and made me long for simple nice-weather-food. When L took a picture of a very stubborn chicken, it was decided. Chicken in puff pasty for dinner!
I love puff pastry. It is one of the most magnificent products around. I usually have a package of the stuff in the freezer or fridge. Roll anything in puff pastry and it looks festive! Perfect for spring, therefor. Some day soon I will give in to my urge to actually make puff pastry myself, but today I just used the roll from the fridge.
Now there are about a million ways to make anything in puff pastry. Whole chicken breasts with veggies, pieces of chicken, or making little ragout-cups and stuffing it with chicken in sauce, or just a simple ragout. After having tried a dozen or so different recipes, lately -or since I’ve had Anne-Sophie – I keep coming back to ground chicken with soft cheese and french herbs. Sometimes I make little individual packages, that are sealed completely, but today I decided to go with a roll. I added a nice, big salad with tomatoes, yellow pepper, onion and greens and a wonderful meal was done!
Chicken in puff pasty (ground-chicken recipe)
- 1 big or 2 smaller chicken breasts
- boursin cheese
- herbes de provence
- salt, pepper
- breadcrumbs (optional)
- big rectangular sheet of puff pasty
Cut the chicken breast(s) into long strips. Using a meat grinder (or food processor, if you don’t have a meat grinder) grind them coarsely. Add in the boursin (I use about half a package, but it really is to taste), herbes de provence, salt, pepper and breadcrumbs. I like to add everything into the grinder at about the same time, so it mixes already, but it can be mixed in later too, just make sure it all blends well.
Roll out the puff pastry. Place your ground-chicken-mix along the long side of the pastry in a long strip, leave a little pastry to fold over. Start rolling by folding the upper little bit of pastry over the chicken-mix and roll it down until you’ve reached the end of the pastry. You’ll have about two layers of pastry all around the chicken. You don’t need to pinch the sides closed, but you can if you want to.
Place chicken roll in the oven on 175-200 degrees celsius for about a half hour, or until chicken in cooked and pastry has puffed and is nice and brownish. Cut into the amount of pieces you want/need and enjoy!
The chicken we ate actually came from the grocery store. No matter how stubborn it was, the chicken we met today, is still roaming around the woods and will hopefully not become dinner for quite some time…
After all the work on arranging this site and it’s layout, I wanted something easy to make for dinner. Easy, yet tasty and with ingredients I actually had (yes, the store was closed by the time I was happy with the layout).
Fortunately I still had a leek and eggs!
When I left my previous job, a couple of guys I worked with a lot actually got me a cookbook. The wonderful classic ‘the Silver Spoon’ to be exact. Anyone who’s ever wanted to cook Italian food needs to get him or herself a copy of this magnificent thing.
Italians know the secret of making the tastiest meals out of just a couple ingredients. Uovo in cocotte is one of those things. There are a number of uovo in cocotte (egg in ramekin) dishes in the book, which I haven’t all tried yet. There’s a lot in the book I haven’t tried, It’s a 1200 page cookbook with the shortest possible recipes, never more than a third of a page. So no, I won’t be done with the book for quite some time.
So leek with egg is was. Some emergency frozen pommes duchesse (mashed potato rosettes), a steak on the grill and voila (or pronto) a wonderful, simple but tasty meal!
Uovo in cocotte ai porri (for 2)
- 1 large leek
- fresh garlic to your liking
- 2 eggs
- butter
- olive oil
- salt, pepper, nutmeg
- 2 ramekins (or other oven-proof, single serving deep dish)
Combine butter and olive oil in a pan, when the butter has melted, add pressed/crushed garlic. Stir so the garlic doesn’t clunk together. Slice and wash leek, add to pan, stir until everything’s shiny from the oil/butter, about 3 to 5 minutes. Add pepper, salt and a bit of nutmeg. Stir. Add a little bit of water and cover the pan to let the leek simmer.
Once the leek is all nice and soft (and smells wonderful if I may add) divide the leek over the 2 ramekins. Make sure you don’t fill it all the way to the top! Break an egg over each ramekin and pop the ramekins into a hot oven (375 or something, I’m bad at Fahrenheit).Leave it in the oven for a couple of minutes until the egg white has set, but the yolk is still nice and soft. Serve in the ramekin.
Santa, or L if you want to be precise, got me a pasta maker for Christmas. Not just any pasta maker, the pasta attachment for my beloved KitchenAid machine (who’s name is Anne-Sophie, by the way, named after the first female chef to ever be awarded with a Michelin star!). Mere days after Christmas I made tried making my first batch of pasta. I had researched the best pasta recipes and figured It’d be easy. An experienced cook, what can go wrong right? Wrong!
Pasta is an art. It really is. To combine just the right amount of flour, eggs and water to make a great dough which your pasta maker will accept isn’t as easy as it looks. Or at least not the first time.
I had absolutely no idea how wet or dry the dough needed to be.
About 2 hours after I started my original batch, I tossed it in the garbage, severely annoyed. L suggested just making something else as by then he was hungry and it didn’t look like dinner would be ready before noon the next day.
I couldn’t give up though. My love of pasta, Anne-Sophie and cooking in general stopped me from sitting down defeated. So I tried a new batch. I tossed my carefully-written-down instructions and just gave it a try. Dinner was late that night. Very late. But in the end I produced my first batch of home made fettuccine. Along with a wonderful gorgonzola cream sauce. Crankiness and anger disappeared instantly and utter fulfillment took it’s place. This was the best pasta alla gorgonzola I’d ever had.
Suffice to say after that first night I learned my lesson. Making pasta is not a science, it’s not about exact measurements and the right size egg. It’s about love for the food and art.
The first months after that batch in December I still measured my flour. I needed to know how much I needed for 2, or 4 or however many people were eating. I’d just add droplets of water or spoonfuls of flour to get it to the right consistency. By now, I’m done with that too. I know how big my ball of dough needs to be. I know how much water or egg to add. I know what happens if you put in an extra egg, or forget the salt. I have finally mastered the art of pasta!
Pasta, basic recipe (for 2)
- About 100 grams of semolina flour (high grade Italian flour, very fine)
- 1 egg, beaten
- As much water as needed to make a firm, yet flexible, dough
- a pinch of salt
Combine everything, either by hand or in a stand mixer with dough hook, pull it through the pasta maker.If pasta falls apart in pasta machine, it’s too dry. If it sticks too machine, it’s too wet. Add flour or a drop of water to correct.
Boil in a large pot of salted water for about a minute and a half and eat with a very simple sauce.
One last note on fresh pasta. Don’t eat it with fancy complicated sauces. Leave those for dried pasta from a package. The taste of freshly made pasta is amazing on it’s own. You don’t want to lose that by overpowering it with sauce.
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