We Are Never Full » food TV

Homemade Stuffed Pasta: Yes We Can!

Amy — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 14:30:39 +0000

“When the world turns its back on you, you turn your back on the world…”

Recently, I’ve been noticing many, many food blogs posting recipes utilizing a certain brand of pre-made “fresh” pastas: nothing like a Foodbuzz promo to bring the best out of the food bloggers. Many came up with very creative recipes using a store-bought, pre-made pasta (a difficult compromise for many hardcore pasta lovers). [In case you were wondering, no, Foodbuzz didn't send us any Buitoni products, and yes, you do detect a hint of bitterness.] A prize of All-Clad Copper Core pots and pans is a pretty damn good prize to inspire the Sandra Lee in all of us. (An Aside: Speaking of Ms. Sandra Lee, has anyone seen that horrid “Kentucky GRILLED Chicken” commercial? We wonder if she is going to take a bucket of that chicken, open up a bag of arugula, throw on some Seven Seas Italian Dressing, and then craft one of her cleverly-branded “tablescapes” featuring giant papier mâché heads of the Colonel?)

After seeing all these different recipes utilizing store-bought pasta (and upset at having been left-out of this Foodbuzz freebie), I was reminded that the average American still thinks that making homemade pasta isn’t possible, and I was determined to prove them wrong. Although I do understand that there is a time and a place for store-bought stuffed pasta and Semi-Homemade/Sandra Lee nights, I also believe that creating homemade, fresh, stuffed pasta is much, much easier than most people think.

The key is in the stuffing. If you can make a delicious stuffing for ravioli, agnolotti, tortellini, cannelloni or any other shape of stuffed pasta your little heart desires, the hardest part is over. If you don’t have a pasta roller (or a rolling-pin), buy some wonton wrappers and do it that way. The key is that you’ve done it – you made it, the stuffing is fresh and includes zero preservatives. You get to control what goes in the stuffing. Get creative ’cause the possibilities are endless.

Although I did make my own pasta for this dish, the star was the stuffing. It was super simple, quick and very easy to make. We happened to find fresh porcini’s in our local market (a freaking miracle) for about $35 a pound, so we bought two ($8!) and decided to blend those with some rehydrated dried ones and a bit of good old (and too often underappreciated) white button mushrooms. A bit of butter, some fresh parmigiano, garlic, shallots and sage, and you’ve got a fab-u-lous, fresh filling for pasta.

Bottom line, if you haven’t tried making your own stuffed pasta, give it a try. Please. Just try.

Mixed Mushroom & Sage-Stuffed Tortelloni

Ingredients:

1 packet homemade pasta or wonton wrappers
2 x 8oz boxes of mushrooms (button, brown, cremini or a mixture of any type of mushroom)
3 cloves of garlic, finely minced
1 shallot, finely minced
8-10 sage leaves, finely minced
½ cup grated parmigiano reggiano
1 tablespoon of unsalted butter
salt and pepper

For the sauce:

4 tablespoons of unsalted butter
5 sage leaves, julienned
4 tbsp grated parmigiano reggiano

Recipe:

Make your filling by gently sautéing mushrooms, shallot and garlic together in butter until all is soft.
Add sage and cheese and combine well. Kill the fire. Taste and season with salt and pepper.
Mixture should be reasonably dry, i.e. not saucy, so that it doesn’t soak into pasta but sits nicely in it. Allow mixture to cool before beginning next step.
If you want to make your own pasta dough and roll your ravioli from scratch, click here for our foolproof recipe tried and tested many times but, most famously, on a weeknight.
If not, take your wonton wrappers, and armed with a glass of water, lay the wrappers out and place a teaspoon of filling in the center of each.
Then, follow the latter part of our tried and tested ravioli-on-a-weeknight-recipe.
To make the brown butter (noisette) and sage sauce, simply melt the remaining butter in a pan and watch it caramelize into a beautiful brown color, adding julienned sage near the end.
Spoon sauce over cooked ravioli/tortelloni and sprinkle liberally with cheese.
Enjoy with red wine and the knowing smugness of having done it all yourself, even if there is no reward of free cookware…

The Forbes Top 10 Richest Celebrity Chef List (Be Prepared to Cry)

Amy — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 01:42:24 +0000

I’m depressed and want to throw up. According to Forbes Magazine, Rachael Ray** is the top-earning celebrity chef (have I mentioned before how much I HATE that term – NOTE TO FORBES: SHE-IS-NOT-A-CHEF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!). The world must really be coming to an end. When will it end!?!!??!?! Ray-ray supposedly makes a nice $18 million per year. I make about $18 a day and I have a masters degree and work for the public school system counseling underprivlidged kids. I may have to move out of my beloved Brooklyn because middle-class earners like me are getting priced out. I’m all for girl power but Rachael Ray makes $18 mill a year and doesn’t own a single restaurant nor spent years and years getting trained and working on the line. I just want everyone to stop calling her a C-H-E-F. Bitter… me? Nah.

What’s interesting is the rest of the list. Look at the jump in salary from Puck to Ramsay. And I’m absolutely sick and dumbfounded that Paula “I Heart Butter” Deen makes more money than Mario Batali. WTF!? And Bobby Flay better check his contract with The Food Network considering he hosts about 5 shows for them, owns a few restaurants all over the US and still only makes the same as Anthony Bourdain.

2. Wolfgang Puck – $16 million
3. Gordon Ramsay- $7.5 million
4. Nobuyuki Matsuhisa – $5 million
5. Alain Ducasse – $5 million
6. Paula Deen – $4.5 million
7. Mario Batali – $3 million
8. Tom Colicchio – $2 million
9. Bobby Flay – $1.5 million
10. Anthony Bourdain – $1.5 million

What do you guys think of this list? Anything shocking to you?

**For those WANF international readers (love you, btw… thanks for visiting!) if you have no idea who Rachael Ray is, you can read up on her here.

Ensalada de Cabrales: When Cheese, Fruit & Nuts Become Sublime

Jonny — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 19:24:35 +0000

There are some things that just strike you as being astonishingly simple, yet brilliantly devised. For example, the interface of an iPod- the way you use it – is unbelievably clever in its design. One “wheel” and one button, and that’s it. Everyone – even me – can figure it out in about 8 seconds. It’s genius at its best.
Similarly, a salad my new man-crush Jose Andres made on his show Jose Made in Spain just struck me as at once achingly simple, and yet wonderfully sophisticated. Cheese, fruit and nuts, and that’s it.

Regular readers will know that we are big fans of the phenomenon that is cabrales cheese (non-regular readers should read this post before proceeding any further with this one, as it’s important to know the ingredient you’re dealing with) but we’ve yet to include it in any of our cooking. Here was an opportunity to incorporate perhaps the world’s wildest cheese into a dish so cunning that, to mix a metaphor, you could cut yourself on it.

Seriously, you might think I’m exaggerating here, but quite apart from that not being what we do here at We Are Never Full (we keep it real, believe), I am not exaggerating one bit. This was the best salad I’ve had in a very, very long time. And, while we wouldn’t normally insult your intelligence by pretending to tell you how to put a salad together, we’re asking you to bear with us here and read on. You’ll be glad you did.

We’ve decided to submit this recipe to Kalyn at Kalyn’s Cooking (a most excellent blog) for her Weekend Herb Blogging series. This time around it’s being hosted by Jugalbandi, so head over there before 3PM today to submit yours!

Ensalada de Cabrales (for 2 people)

Ingredients

1 large apple – gala, fuji, granny smith, golden delicious, but not McIntosh type

2oz strong cabrales or your favorite blue cheese

3 hazelnuts (shelled, roasted, but unsalted)

1tbsp good cider vinegar

3tbsp your best olive oil

1 tsp finely chopped chives

salt & black pepper

Recipe

Peel and core apple, then using a mandolin (if you have one, otherwise your trusty chef’s knife will suffice) slice the apple to a uniform thickness of about 1/4 inch (1/2cm)

Arrange apples on serving dish however you like and crumble over the cheese. Feel free to use more, but you easily be over-generous with cabrales, so beware.

Combine oil, vinegar, salt & pepper (as a vinaigrette) and spoon liberally over apples and cheese.

Then, take your microplane grater or the fine side of your box grater and grate your hazelnuts. Sprinkle this “hazelnut salt” followed by the chives over your salad and serve immediately.

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Lidia’s Lamb Chops

Jonny — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 18:32:52 +0000

If you’re anything like us then you’ll probably have a couple of dishes that you crave more often than anything else. And, again, if you’re like us, you probably always have the ingredients for such dishes in your pantry in preparation for whenever that craving strikes. These are the dishes that, like a line-cook in a restaurant, you can turn out with the minimum of fuss in almost exactly the same way everytime. Now, this is not to say that such dishes are any less delicious or complex to prepare than others you make less regularly, but that once you’ve got the recipe memorized and get into a rhythym with it, you can make the dish just the way you like it without really having to think about it.

This is the way we are with a dish we call “lidia’s lamb”. I’ve no idea what the real name for it is since I’ve never looked up a recipe for it and I’ve only watched it being prepared once, on TV, by Lidia Bastianich, on her show Lidia’s Italy, but that’s what we call it. Essentially, it’s lamb shoulder chops braised in a sauce made from dijon mustard, anchovies, garlic and chicken stock, but such a description belies its richness and savory flavors and, if you’re crazy and you don’t like anchovies, it will put you off. So, just take it from me, you need to try this dish. It’s virtually impossible to mess up, it’s delicious and you can make it from scratch in under an hour, making it perfect for a weeknight meal, or if lamb is hard to find or expensive where you live, a good option for a dinner party because it’s so easily scalable for larger numbers. Plus, once you’ve made it the first time, you’ll be having cravings for it a lot.

Lidia’s Lamb
(recipe serves 2, but for more just scale the recipe up. You’ll probably need more than one pan too, but you can figure that out yourself)

Ingredients
2 lamb shoulder chops (4-6 oz each)
approx. 2 pints chicken stock
2-5 cloves garlic, thinly sliced (depending on your tolerance for the stinking rose)
1-2 shallots, finely chopped
2-4 anchovy fillets (the salty ones in oil, you know what I’m talking about) (add more of less depending on how squeamish you are about anchovies – see final note below)
6-8 tbsp smooth dijon mustard (we prefer Maille, but Grey Poupon is fine. Don’t even think about using American yellow mustard! Save that for your hot dog.)
2-3oz plain flour
2 tbsp olive oil
black pepper to taste

Recipe
Heat a large skillet to medium-high heat. Dredge chops in flour and shake off excess. Hit pan with the olive oil and add the chops.
Cook chops for about three minutes per side, or until golden brown. Make a hot spot in the pan and add the shallots and garlic.

Allow these to saute for a couple of minutes until softened and fragrant, then add the anchovies. Stir anchovies vigorously around the pan until they start to disintegrate. After about another minute or two, add enough stock so that the liquid is at the same level as the “top” of the chops. Using your tongs, scrape the crusty bits off the bottom of the pan and turn the chops over. Add about half the mustard at this point and stir it in.

Reduce heat to medium and allow chops to braise in simmering liquid for about another 25-30 minutes, turning chops occasionally. Keep an eye on the level of the liquid and add more stock whenever it falls below the “top” of the chops. Meat should have begun to pull away from the bones after about 30 minutes.

Taste the sauce at this point. It should taste like it needs more mustard. Add some or all of the remaining tablespoons of mustard according to your taste. Increase heat to medium-high and allow sauce to thicken for about another 5-8 minutes. When it’s done the sauce should be around halfway up the chops and be of a medium thickness, with a pleasant sheen to it. Check seasoning and add black pepper to taste before serving.

We often serve this with some roasted potatoes because they usually take approximately the same amount of time to cook as the meat, providing you cut them reasonably small, parboil them first, and slap them in at least a 400F oven. We also often serve it with some asparagus, kale or broccoli di rape on the side. It sounds kind of heavy I know, but it’s really pretty well-balanced and very satisfying. I promise you, you’ll like this one.

And, just a final note, if you’re worried that the people you’re cooking for don’t like anchovies, I will be amazed if they can tell this dish contains anchovies. All the anchovies do here is add a salty, umami-ish flavor to the dish that brings it all together. You’ll notice that I don’t add salt to the recipe – that’s why. So, please don’t exclude the anchovies because the dish will not be the same without them. Again, just trust us on this one.