Love through the stomach... » Olive oil

Lamb and peppers

Valerie — Thu, 22 May 2014 16:44:34 +0000

In the 2+ years that I haven’t posted, things sure have changed. For a while I cooked and baked less. Recently I started cooking differently mostly.
Still fresh and home-made, just quick, quick, quick for the adults, and more elaborate for our newest little gourmet.

Our daughter was born in October of 2013 and has started enjoying solid food. We do a combination of various styles of weaning. Baby Led Weaning (or the Rapley method) is one of the things we do, giving her whole chunks of veggies, often off our plates, to learn to eat.

Another style I love is the Italian ‘pappe’. A fairly liquid form of baby food, made fresh with meat, veggies and cream of rice/corn/tapioca/wheat, in a broth base.

Our little cupcake loves it all. Eating is super fun!

Below you see today’s lunch, Red bell peppers, and lamb in vegetable broth with a mixture of cream of various wheats and cream of corn and tapioca. To flavor it and help digestion we added a tiny bit of parmesan cheese and obviously some extra virgin olive oil. Despite (or thanks to?) the strong flavor of the bell peppers, Cupcake gobbled it right up!

Guanciale (pasta all’amatriciana)

Valerie — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 17:01:01 +0000

Guanciale, one of Italy's tastiest secrets.

If you’ve ever read this blog before and/or haven’t been hiding under a rock, you know that I love Italian delicacies. Unfortunately with the exception of prosciutto di Parma and Parmigiano and Pecorino, most Italian meats and cheeses are either hard to come by outside of Italy, or extremely expensive. Sure, knock-offs are widely available since Italian food has become immensely popular around the globe, but the true taste of Italy is hard to come by.

One of these delicacies is guanciale. Guanciale translates to ‘little cheeks’, but there’s nothing little about it – not in size, nor in flavor. Guanciale is a cheek though. It’s a pork cheek, cured and generously seasoned with amongst other spices, lots of black pepper. Guanciale looks a little like bacon, the consistency and taste however is much, much more delicate.

When we visited Milan last month I brought back a guanciale. I also brought two different sausages and a piece of speck, 3 different cheeses (large chunks) and 4 kilos of flour home with me, but today I’m writing about the guanciale.

Guanciale is for sale at every supermarket or butcher.

One side is heavily seasoned, the other side has the chewy (cleaned) skin.

Guanciale is the meat that’s traditionally used for pasta all’amatriciana and pasta alla carbonara. Or that’s what the internet likes me to believe. I absolutely adore guanciale, there is no way to describe it. If you like bacon (and really, who doesn’t) you’ll like guanciale. It’s better than bacon! And no, that’s not heresy, because really it’s just bacon with even more flavor.

The guanciale cut up in strips

The first thing I used my guanciale for (I got a whole piece, so it’s quite large) was for a 1-dish-meal version of Pasta all’Amatriciana. I hadn’t had time to buy groceries and my zucchini plant had shed it’s last fruit, I had guanciale, I had tomatoes, I had pasta and I figured it just had to do.
Do it did! The pasta was delicious, the guanciale gave it just the nice little different kick that you wouldn’t have had with bacon or another meat. It was the perfect way to inaugurate the food I’d smuggled* home!

Adding cheese into the pan before serving

Pasta all’Amatriciana (with extra veggies)

Recipe Type: main

Author: Valerie/Love through the stomach…

Prep time: 5 mins

Cook time: 15 mins

Total time: 20 mins

Serves: 2

This is a variation on the classic pasta all’Amatriciana adding more vegetables to make it a single-course main dish.

Ingredients

short pasta (penne, rigatoni, fussilli etc enough for 2 persons)
200 grams of guanciale (substitute bacon if you don’t have guanciale)
1 package of passata di pomodori (strained tomatoes)
1 or 2 small red chilis (to taste)
1 whole clove of garlic, peeled
1 medium zucchini
plenty of pecorino or parmigiano cheese
olive oil
some small fresh tomatoes (optional)

Instructions

Boil the pasta in plenty salted water.
Drizzle a skillet or heavy bottomed frying pan with a little olive oil, then add the guanciale or bacon, the chili(s) and the garlic and cook them on fairly low heat. You want the Guanciale to release some fat and the chili and garlic to release flavor, be careful not to brown them.
Dice the zucchini (remove the watery inner core) and add to pan. Once the garlic is brown, remove it. Depending on the lever of heat you like, you can either remove the chilis as well or leave them in (or cut them up with or without seeds).
Add the passata di pomodori (strained tomatoes) to the pan, enough to make the amount of sauce you like. I use about 2/3 of a cup.
Drain the pasta when al dente, then add to pan with sauce. If you have them, you can now add some diced fresh tomatoes to the pan as well. Mix well, remove from heat, add a generous amount of cheese, stir the cheese in and serve immediately.

The finished dish, delicious!

*Since I’m within the EU, it obviously wasn’t smuggling, but traveling with 4 kilo’s of white powder and very smelly (garlicy sausages, cheese) in my suitcase, it sortof felt like I did!

Roasted tomato sauce

Valerie — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 20:18:21 +0000

Summer in Amsterdam lasted about 2 days. Strike that, we had 2 summers this year, both lasting about 1 day. It caused the sad demise of my tomatoes, which I told you about before.

I was able to rescue a small bowl full of half ripe tomatoes and put them in the window sill. Helping them ripen by gaining every tiny little ray of sunlight available. Once they were ripe, I ceased the moment to make my roasted tomato sauce.

Tomatoes and other veggies before they became sauce.

I usually try to make a batch large enough to last me through winter. This time the sauce won’t go that far, but at least it’ll last me a little while. Since I hardly ever use it as is, I can stretch it quite far. The fact that it’s so concentrated, and roasted, makes it versatile and easy and healthy enough for a quick weeknight meal, but flavorful and special enough to also use in a special dinner. I’ve been known to add broth to it and make a very tasty tomato soup. My 4 year old cousin who despises vegetables or healthy food in general was happy to eat many bites of pasta with this sauce because it really is that good (and to the unsuspected viewer doesn’t look like it’s almost 100 percent vegetable!)

I loved making this sauce with veggies from my garden. Despite the fact that it isn’t much, I know I’ve put them to good use. And every time this fall and winter, when I eat sauce, I will remember the fact that I actually grew food myself. That really is something too, at least for a city girl like me.

Vegetables in the casserole dish, ready to be roasted.

Needless to say, I love making this sauce. I freeze it into ice cubes -sauce cubes – and add it to whatever sauce or dish I’m making which can benefit from the taste of home-made roasted tomato sauce.

I’ve made many variations of this sauce over time. Sometimes I add carrots, Sometimes regular onions. The only constant really are the tomatoes. The other constant is that it’ll be the best sauce you’ve ever tasted!

Vegetables in casserole dish, after about 45 minutes of roasting.

Roasted tomato sauce

Author: Valerie / Love through the stomach…

Prep time: 10 mins

Cook time: 1 hour 50 mins

Total time: 2 hours

Ingredients

12-15 tomatoes, nice and ripe
1 orange bell pepper
2 chili peppers
1 head of garlic
5 or 6 scallions
olive oil
salt
fresh herbs

Instructions

Cut all the vegetables into large chunks and place them in a casserole dish. Drizzle with olive oil, add a little salt and place in a hot oven (350F/175C), stir/turn vegetables over after about 45 minutes. Once the vegetables are all nice and very soft add the fresh herbs and place back in the oven for about 30 minutes.
Once the vegetables are done, process them through a food mill into a fairly thick sauce.
Let the sauce cool down and divide it into ice cube trays or small freezer safe bowls and freeze the sauce for later use.
Use the sauce as is or add it to some ground beef or to some plain strained tomatoes for a variation in sauce.

Notes

Don’t worry if the vegetables get fairly dark, that’s all extra taste! Make sure they don’t fully burn though, if it goes too fast, lower the heat of your oven.
If you use a KitchenAid food mill (attached to a stand mixer) take the scraps through the mill at least once again or until the scraps are completely dry, the sauce will be even more concentrated and have more flavor!
Below are pictures of the process from removing the vegetables from the oven to the final product, sauce in cubes and dry scraps of seeds and skins to be discarded.

Roasted vegetables done and ready to be processed into sauce.

The roasted vegetables going through the food mill to become sauce.

Roasted tomato sauce put in a cutesy ice cube tray to be frozen for later use.

After putting the roasted vegetables through the KitchenAid food mill and re-processing the discarded scraps, this little dry heap of skins and seeds is what's left to toss.

Onion soup

Valerie — Sat, 13 Aug 2011 09:18:24 +0000

It looks like I’ve neglected this blog lately. Nothing is less true though. I looked at it at least daily, only to find out that I still couldn’t upload anything. Fortunately last night, as I got cranky about it and was researching other webhosts, Laurens found a way to fix it. Gotta love having your own IT-helpdesk at home!

While I couldn’t post I did cook, and wen’t out to dinner, and did things in the garden. This summer has been exceptionally crappy though, so my usual summer meals have not been all that present, unfortunately.

On one particularly crappy-weahtered late afternoon I decided I wanted soup. And not a nice, cold, summery soup either. I wanted full bodied, warm wintery soup, or at least fall soup if such a thing exists. Not having had onion soup for quite a while I decided to go for that.

Onion soup is one of those marvelous things in life which you can make as easy and as complicated as you want. You can spend hours upon hours caramellizing onions before adding broth or you could throw raw onions in said broth and if you heat it long enough, they’ll soften after all.

My prefferred method is something in between. I don’t fully caramellize the onions, but I do cook them for quite a while until they’re nice and soft and glassy before I add broth. Seasoning whise I can go many ways as well, but this particular time I’d just received that beautiful bag of herbes de provence so that was an obious choice. Depending on my mood I like to add some red or white wine, or some balsamic vinegar. This was a vinegarry day.

The soup cooked for quite a little while and smelled up the entire house. Once dinner time came around I cut up some baguette and grated some cheese and added both atop the soup in my le creuset ramekins. Under the broiler they went, for a couple of minutes, and voila, perfect soup for a cold, dreary ~~winter~~ summer evening.

Onion soup

Recipe Type: soup

Prep time: 15 mins

Cook time: 1 hour 15 mins

Total time: 1 hour 30 mins

Serves: 4-8

Ingredients

5 medium/large onions
butter and olive oil
herbes de provence
2 liters of beef broth
black pepper
a splash of balsamic vinegar
garlic, salt, bread and cheese optional

Instructions

Peel and half the onions, slice thinly, mince garlic.
Add butter and oil to a large pan, enough to generously cover the bottom. Cook onions until they’re nice and very glassy and some of them have browned a bit. Add the garlic and herbes de provence to taste and cook for another few minutes.
Add the broth all at once and bring to a boil, then reduce heat to simmer. Add a little splash of balsamic vinegar (taste after little splashes, as it can become too sweet) and add fresh cracked black pepper to taste. If your broth wasn’t salty enough, you can add some salt.
Let the soup simmer for at least 30 minutes, then ladle into oven proof soup bowl or ramekins, put a piece of bread and grated cheese on top and broil until the cheese is melted and a little browned.

Notes

The amount of people this soup serves depends on whether you want it as a starter or a main. As a starter you could beed up to 8 people, as a main, 4 is the limit.

Pici con le Briciole

Valerie — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 21:16:02 +0000

(pici with breadcrumbs)

The reason I love Italian cuisine so much might just be the simplicity. The ease in which few but wonderful ingredients are changed into beautiful, flavourful dishes. No need for crazy expensive ingredients, just make sure your veggies are fresh, ripe and delicious and a tomato can become a feast.

I went searching for inspiration last week. I love to make my own fresh pasta. Heck, I love to make good quality dried pasta with nice sauces. But I’d fallen into the trap of the “few favorites”. My simple ragu, or even simpler meatless tomato sauce, pesto, my favourite creamy gorgonzola sauce, pasta in brodo.

So I went to Jul’s Kitchen. Browsing her blog I got jealous of the fact that she has all these beautiful ingredients available to her. Still, even though my tomatoes might not be as fresh as hers, her blog is an absolute inspiration to me.

I stumbled upon Jul’s nonna’s recipe for “pici”. A fresh, handrolled eggless pasta. She mentioned that the traditional sauce for pici is ‘Aglione’. It sounded interesting, to say the least – and tasty. A fun new thing to try, something to get me out of my rut.

I googled ‘Aglione sauce’ and the first link I found talked about garlic and breadcrumbs. While tweeting with Jul she let me know that in fact, that wasn’t Aglione sauce. It was “Pici con le Briciole”. Pici with breadcrumbs.

Making the pici dough was easy enough. It really is just flour, water and a pinch of salt. After rolling out the dough, Jul advised me to spread some olive oil over it, cover it with cling film and let it rest for about 2 hours.
Actually shaping the pici after cutting proved to be the hardest challenge. Fortunately they’re not supposed to be perfectly uniform, but still, it took me quite a while. And despite the fact that it’s highly therapeutic, I’m glad that Jul and I decided on a prop-swap during Food Blogger Connect in August. She agreed to bring me a special inverted rolling pin to make my pici from now on.

And this is something I love about the food-blogger-world. When you find – or meet – or stumble upon someone who is passionate about their specialty, they are so happy and willing to help you get into it too. Jul is a self-confessed ‘Fresh Pasta Maniac’, I’ve confided my love of Italian cooking and (fresh) pasta on here many times as well. She can help improve my skills – and get me some highly useful Italian kitchen tool – while I’ll get her into a Dutch cookie tradition.

So that night, after my browsing and tweeting, Laurens and I ate pici con le briciole. I was able to present Laurens with an Italian meal he didn’t even know existed. We both liked it, a lot! Now I can’t wait to try the Pici all’Aglione.