Mimi’s post about gnocchi in a walnut cream sauce inspired me to try my own version. Instead of a sauce with cream, I made the classic Ligurian walnut sauce with milk, day-old bread, garlic, marjoram, and olive oil. The sauce has a nice full walnut flavor that works very well with the sweetness of the potato gnocchi. Thanks for the idea, Mimi! Continue reading “Gnocchi with Walnut Sauce (Gnocchi in Salsa di Noci)”
Stéphane Gabart has beautiful photograph on his blog My French Heaven, and the recipes he shares with us are both simple and delicious. His post on gravlax inspired me to try this for myself. Gravlax or gravad laks is salmon cured with salt and sugar. This used to be a method to preserve salmon, and nowadays it is still prepared for its nice flavor. The name actually means “buried salmon” in Scandiavian languages, as the salmon used to be buried on the beach to preserve it.
Gravad lax tastes similar to smoked salmon, except that it’s not smoked. It is very easy to make your own, which will certainly impress your friends. All you need is sushi grade salmon and some patience. Continue reading “Homemade Gravlax”
Because I cook sous-vide so often, a vacuum sealer is a necessity in my kitchen. The simple ‘clamp’ or ‘edge’ vacuum sealer (also known as ‘Foodsaver type’ vacuum sealer) that I have been using for three years is starting to fall apart and so it was time for a new one. That was a good excuse reason to purchase a chamber vacuum sealer. Continue reading “Crispy Cucumber from my new Chamber Vacuum Sealer”
Rendang Daging is beef stewed in coconut milk with spices until all of the coconut milk has been reduced and the beef is tender. The stew becomes more and more dry, and turns from a light color to a dark color because of the caramelization that will occur. Rendang is traditionally served at festive occasions. The cooking method was developed to preserve meat in a tropical climate before refrigerators were available. Now rendang is still prepared because it is loaded with flavor. Rendang is so popular that it is regarded the national dish of Indonesia. Continue reading “Rendang Daging (Indonesian Beef Stew)”
Beef short ribs sous-vide are great, and I already did a post on the best cooking time and temperature for them. With some experimenting I found that for ‘regular’ beef short ribs, 48 hours at 57ºC/135ºF is best. However, not all beef is alike and I found that for wagyu short ribs a lower temperature and longer cooking time are better: 72 hours at 55ºC/131ºF. I suppose I could stop the post here, but I’m going to show you the nice photos that I took 🙂 Continue reading “Wagyu Short Ribs Sous-Vide”
Months ago I received a surprise package from Richard McGary with a challenge and lots of chile peppers. One of the contents of the package was a jar with Richard’s homemade Ancho Chile Rub. This is a spice mix with ancho chile as the main ingredient that I liked a lot. I tried it with salmon and tuna. The ancho chile rub is not just spicy — it has a deep earthy flavor that goes well with both meat and fish. I liked it so much in fact, that I finished the jar that Richard sent pretty quickly. And so I had to make my own. Continue reading “Richard’s Ancho Chile Rub”
Canned tuna is cheap, but often of inferior quality. The tuna is dry and tastes mostly of salt. I have found good quality ‘organic’ canned tuna from the Ortiz brand, but that is more expensive than sashimi grade fresh tuna. So when I read about tuna cooked sous-vide with olive oil at 71ºC/160ºF for an hour as a tasty alternative for canned tuna on SVKitchen.com, my interest was piqued and I decided to give this a try. As the tuna will be pasteurized with this cooking time and temperature, it is perfectly fine to use frozen tuna for this that is a lot cheaper than sushi grade fresh tuna. Continue reading “Tuna Confit Sous-Vide”
Cavolo nero is my favorite type of cabbage. You could substitute with kale if you can’t find cavolo nero, but cavolo nero has a sweeter taste. You can think of it as the elegant Italian cousin of kale. This pasta dish is quick, easy, and delicious. The cavolo nero is parboiled and then stir fried while the pasta is cooking. To complete the dish, the cavolo and pasta are tossed with parmigiano and a bit of the pasta cooking water. The ‘sauce’ that is thus created of the cooking water and parmigiano is very creamy and works very well with the flavor and crunchiness of the cavolo nero.
Continue reading “Penne with Cavolo Nero and Parmigiano”
Chicken Fajitas are my favorite Mexican dish. Part of the reason for this is that I do not know a lot of Mexican dishes 😉 and I have never actually been to Mexico. My first introduction to chicken fajitas was … Continue reading Homemade Chicken Fajitas
After yesterday’s post telling you about making the components for fajitas from scratch, it’s not much of a surprise that today’s post is about making homemade flour tortillas.
I have a confession to make. I’m not good with rolling pins. Maybe it’s a matter of patience (of which I have very little), but I always get grumpy when I try to roll out dough with a rolling pin. I especially hate it when it keeps shrinking (I know it helps to allow the dough to rest to avoid this, but still). This is why I never make pasta the classical way with a rolling pin (which according to Italians is the superior method), but with a pasta rolling machine. And this is also part of the reason why I never made flour tortillas from scratch before. So when I was purchasing some dried chipotle and ancho chiles from an online store that sells Mexican stuff, on a whim I clicked and added a tortilla press to my order. Continue reading “Homemade Flour Tortillas”
If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you know that I like making everything from scratch using fresh ingredients. Chicken fajitas are one of my favorite dishes to prepare when I don’t have time and/or equipment to make everything from scratch (like when we are vacationing in an RV), as they are very tasty and store-bought flour tortillas and salsa are of acceptable quality. I had never made fajitas from scratch yet, and I wanted to try to see if it would be worth the effort compared to using store-bought components. And so I needed to make my own salsa as one of the components. Continue reading “Salsa Roja (Roasted Tomato Salsa)”
There are few vegetables that have different names in the UK, the US, and Australia, but witlof is one of them. Witlof is what it’s called in Australia and the Netherlands, but it is called Belgian Endive in the US and Chicory in the UK. In this post I’m going to stick to witlof, as this is a Dutch salad.
A witlof salad with mandarins and walnuts is a very homey Dutch dish, that is often made with canned mandarins and store-bought dressing. As such it is okay but nothing special. With a few touches I’ve transformed it into something a lot better: using fresh mandarins rather than from a can, toasting the walnuts, and making my own dressing with fresh mandarin juice and zest, honey and walnut oil. Continue reading “Belgian Endive/Witlof/Chicory Salad with Mandarins and Walnuts”
I always thought it was impossible to prepare a perfect duck breast. Duck breast consists of two parts: the skin and the meat. To be perfect, the skin should be crispy with most of the fat rendered out of it, and the meat should be medium rare. Both at the same time seemed to be impossible, as the meat overcooks while you are rendering the fat from the skin. Even experimenting didn’t help to solve this conundrum.
But then I thought of Transglutaminase, an enzyme that is sold mixed with maltodextrin and sodium caseinate under the name of Activa RM and is also known as ‘meat glue’. Why not take the skin off the meat, cook skin and meat separately, and then glue them back together again? Teun had some Activa and so I went over to his place to try this. And guess what? It worked! Crispy skin and meat that was uniformly medium rare all the way up to the skin. (Unfortunately I only took photos with my iPhone in bad lighting conditions. I will prepare duck breast this way again and then take good photos and post a proper recipe.) Continue reading “Perfect Duck Breast Using Transglutaminase”
If you don’t want to cook but like to impress at a dinner party, bresaola is what you should look for in an antipasto. Bresaola is Italian air-dried, salted beef that has been aged two or three months. Like carpaccio (raw beef) it is often served with shaved parmesan, roasted pine nuts and arugula, but it has much more flavor. Bresaola has a very rich pleasant flavor. I like to brush the bresaola with a bit of aged balsamic vinegar. The good stuff is called aceto balsamico tradizionale, is aged for at least 12 years, and very expensive. But you only need half a teaspoon or so per serving. Continue reading “Bresaola”
A few weeks ago I was envious of the fresh figs Richard McGary used for his wonderful Chicken Quarters with Fig Chutney, as good quality fresh figs are very hard to get in this country. I remember eating fresh figs in southern Italy and being impressed how great they were compared to the watery imported stuff I’m used to. But lo and behold, quite soon afterwards I picked up some very decent fresh figs from the market and they were even a bargain. As I picked up a rabbit from the same market, I pretty soon came up with the idea to prepare the rabbit with a fresh fig sauce. Continue reading “Rabbit Legs Sous-Vide with Fresh Fig Sauce”
It always surprises me when a lamb recipe uses beef stock for the sauce, or when a veal recipe uses chicken stock for the sauce, or… well I guess you catch my drift. Of course such substitutions can be made … Continue reading Rabbit Stock
Cuts of meat that come from different muscle groups in an animal require different cooking to make them shine. For instance, a ribeye steak is best served medium rare after a quick sear and some resting, whereas a brisket needs to be cooked low and slow to become tender and delicious to eat. Smaller animals like chickens and rabbits are often cooked whole, disregarding the wisdom gained from preparing beef in separate parts. Part of the reason for this may be that a chicken fits easier into most pans and ovens than a whole cow does 😉 A more economical reason is that if you judge by effort per pound of meat, a relatively big effort is needed to separate the different muscle groups of a small animal. Even so, it is worth doing so to get the best results. This is also true for rabbit. Rabbit loins are the ‘rib eye’ of the rabbit, they are very tender and require very little cooking. The legs and other parts however need to be braised or stewed. Even so, rabbit is often cooked whole with the loin dried out.
I thought this to be a waste of a very nice piece of meat, and so when I bought a whole rabbit I decided to do my own butchering and divide the rabbit into loins, legs, flap meat, and carcass. (Of course you can also ask your butcher to do this for you.) The latter three parts will be used for tomorrow’s recipe. The tenderloins are so small in a 1.1 kg (2.5 lbs) rabbit that they are hardly worth getting out. The loins themselves were about 160 grams together or about 14% of the weight of the rabbit.
On the same day I had bought the rabbit, I had also bought some very nice prosciutto. As I still have fresh sage growing in my garden, I decided to turn those rabbit loins into rabbit saltimbocca. Saltimbocca is a famous dish from Rome consisting of veal scaloppine with prosciutto and sage. It is so delicious that it is called “jump into mouth” (salt = jump, bocca = mouth). I prefer to have a rabbit jumping in the direction of my mouth rather than a calf 😉 But seriously, this rabbit saltimbocca was absolutely delicious. The meat is super tender and succulent, and pairs very well with the prosciutto and sage. Compared to the veal version, it is a bit lighter and softer in style.
Continue reading “Rabbit Loin Saltimbocca (Saltimbocca di Coniglio)”
Did you know October 25 is World Pasta Day? I didn’t until today. For us, almost every day is pasta day. There are countless varieties and even more sauces, and we like them all. I’ve written before on this blog that my love for Italian cooking initiated from the books of Biba Caggiano. I have almost all of her books, and I have cooked many of the recipes in them. But not all, and today’s pasta is a dish that I had never tried yet, even though it’s in the first of Biba’s books I have owned for 15 years now. I wish now I had tried it sooner, because it is really good!
Gramigna is a special kind of homemade local pasta from Bologna. Gramigna are often served wit sausage and cream, and Biba was inspired by that for the sauce in this recipe. As you need a special tool to make gramigna, we prepared fresh fettuccine instead. Continue reading “Fettuccine with Porcini, Sausage, and Cream”
Stuffed savoy cabbage or involtini di verza are quite a ‘homey’ dish, but they are so tasty and nice looking to boot that I dare to serve them at a dinner party. There is no single recipe for them — as with many Italian dishes there are as many variations as there are families. The general idea is that a large leaf of green curly savoy cabbage is parboiled, stuffed and then baked. I stuffed my version with the tender inner cabbage, minced beef and pork, mortadella, fennel seeds, and parmigiano and they were absolutely wonderful. The mortadella is important as it adds a lot of flavor, but if you use too much it will overpower the rest. I’m not usually big on cabbage, so I was surprised how delicious these turned out to be. Continue reading “Stuffed Cabbage (Involtini di Verza)”
One of the best dinners we’ve had so far this year was at La Madia in Sicily. One of the dishes there was Battutino di gambero rosso, maionese di bottarga di tonno e olio al mandarino.
This is what I wrote in my review: “Carpaccio of prawns, flattened into a perfect disc, served with a bottarga mayonnaise and mandarin olive oil. It was suggested to spread out the ‘mayo’, which we did, and it was a great combination with the prawns and didn’t overpower them. Great balance of flavors, although I may have liked a slightly ‘fresher’ taste.”
The type of prawns used in this dish is not available fresh in the Netherlands, but I love raw langoustines (scampi) that are locally caught. When I saw fresh langoustines at the market, I decided to create a dish that was inspired by the combination of flavors at La Madia. The result was an appetizer of langoustine tartare with mandarin zest infused olive oil, mandarin juice, bottarga, and mandarin. It was very nice as a small appetizer (amuse bouche). The flavors worked very well together, and I liked that it was ‘fresher’ than the dish at La Madia. The dried bottarga was not as smooth as the bottarga mayo at La Madia, but it was nice all the same. Continue reading “Langoustine Tartare with Mandarin and Bottarga”
It is hunting season, which means that game like wild boar and venison are on the menu. A classic recipe from Tuscany is pappardelle al ragù di cinghiale, fresh wide ribbon pasta with a sauce of wild boar stewed in tomatoes. … Continue reading Pappardelle al Ragù di Cinghiale (Fresh Pasta with Wild Boar Ragù)
Stéphane from My French Heaven always has wonderful photos on his blog and recipes that are as simple as they are tasty. His recent post about his version of the French classic rabbit in mustard sauce was all the inspiration I needed to make my own sous-vide version.
Continue reading “Rabbit Sous-Vide with Mustard Sauce (Lapin à la Dijonnaise)”
The inspiration for serving herring marinated in lime juice with cucumber comes from an amuse bouche served by Albert when he cooked dinner for us.
Brined herring is a Dutch delicacy, prepared by ripening the herrings for a couple of days in oak barrels in a brine. The pancreatic enzymes which support the ripening make this version of salt herring especially mild and soft. Marinating it in lime juice (ceviche style) makes it even milder and softer. As brined herring is served with pickled cucumber and raw chopped onion in the Netherlands, I prepared the foam with cucumber, yogurt, and raw shallot (a variation of a recipe that came with the iSi gourmet whip). The combination with the herring worked out great and I will definitely make this again.
Continue reading “Herring Ceviche with Cucumber Foam”
The dinner we cooked when Teun came over consisted of tuna with runner beans as antipasto, gnocchi alla sorrentina as primo, iberico pork sous-vide as secondo, and finally chocolate stuffed ancho chile with amarena cherries as dolce. The pigs that are grown for the famous jamón ibérico from Spain do not just yield the hams, but also other fine cuts of meat. The finest is called the secreto (literally secret) and is a very nicely marbled piece of pork with lots of flavor. Teun and Albert introduced me to this cut, and I absolutely love it. Cooking it sous-vide is of course a great way to enjoy it to its fullest. I thought it would be nice to combine it with celeriac fondant, and the dish did turn out great. Continue reading “Iberico Secreto Sous-Vide with Celeriac Fondant Sous-Vide”
Teun came over to cook together for the first time again after my trip to Australia, and we created this appetizer together. This use of runner beans was inspired by snow peas that looked like seaweed at Vermeer. The combination of the raw tuna with the crispy runner beans and the spicy dressing works really well. Continue reading “Tuna Tartare with Runner Bean ‘Seaweed’”
Home made potato gnocchi made from scratch are the best! They are so much better than chewy store-bought ones. I’ve only posted about potato gnocchi once before: gnocchi with gorgonzola was the first recipe I ever posted on this blog. The city of Sorrento is near the island of Capri, the island that gave its name to the famous Insalata Caprese with tomato, mozzarella, and basil. You can think fo Gnocchi alla Sorrentina as the gnocchi version of this salad, because the gnocchi are dressed with fresh tomato sauce, mozzarella, basil, and parmigiano reggiano. This combination is always a winner, and it is even more so with feathery light homemade potato gnocchi.
Continue reading “Gnocchi alla Sorrentina”
Guess whose idea it was to use chile peppers for dessert? Who else but Richard McGary! I found his recipe for Cinnamon Candied Chile Relleno with Red Wine Chocolate Sauce very intriguing, and knew I had to try something similar. I thought it was very appropriate to use the ancho chiles that Richard had sent me to prepare this very unusual but very tasty dessert. The base of the dessert is a chile pepper stuffed with chocolate mousse. Richard soaks the chiles in cinnamon syrup and serves them with pecans and red wine chocolate sauce. I made my own version with an Italian twist by pairing the chocolate stuffed chile with tart amarena cherries and almonds. It was really good, and definitely something I’ll make again. Thanks Richard! Continue reading “Ancho Chile with Chocolate Mousse and Amarena Cherries”
Mousse au Chocolat is one of the standard desserts of France, along with the perhaps even more common Crème caramel. My first attempt to find a simple recipe failed miserably, as the mousse turned out way too dense. I found the solution in a recipe by Delia Smith, which is to use water. This makes for a nice light mousse. To make things a little more interesting I decided to substitute half of the water with amaretto liqueur, but that is not at all necessary for a great result. If you have a stand mixer or another way of whipping egg whites, this is relatively easy to prepare and oh so good if you like chocolate. And who doesn’t?! Here’s my version.
Continue reading “Chocolate Mousse (Mousse au Chocolat)”
The second time I cooked in someone else’s kitchen because I couldn’t use mine, I went to my parents. (In the meantime the floor has been finished and I can use my kitchen again, and I have been so busy cooking to celebrate that I didn’t have time left to post — the posts from that cooking frenzy will follow soon.) As I was surprised how good mussels with roquefort turned out to be, I thought it’d be nice to share this with my parents as I know they love seafood. To turn it into a whole dish of Italian-French fusion, I made a combination of pasta with mussels and broccoli with the roquefort sauce. It was no surprise that it turned out nicely. If you like mussels and blue cheese, you have got to try the combination. It really works!
Continue reading “Pasta with Mussels, Roquefort and Broccoli”
We are back home from our travels through Australia. Since this is a food blog rather than a travel blog, let me suffice by showing you a map of the route we have traveled (6000 km or almost 4000 miles altogether) in a camper van from coast to coast.
In the other posts I wrote about cooking in the Outback, I told you about how we would on most days kept the cooking to a bare minimum and simply put meat like beef, lamb or kangaroo on our small BBQ. But on one day during a long drive from the West MacDonnells to Kings Canyon I had plenty of time to think and decided to make something that would require more actual ‘cooking’ with the ingredients I had in the camper and of course taking into account the very limited equipment at my disposal. We did not have time to do any shopping, so I used only the ingredients I had bought without a clear idea of how I would use them.
I thought it would be nice not to use the BBQ for a change, and so I decided to simmer pork chops in tomato sauce and then serve the tomato sauce over pasta with additional mushrooms as a primo piatto, followed by the pork chops with the remaining tomato sauce as a secondo (click here if you’d like to know more about the Italian menu structure). I would have liked to use a better marbled shoulder chop for this, but I only had a loin chop so that is what I used. The result was quite nice and I will probably repeat this at home with a shoulder chop or perhaps even sous-vide. Here’s what I did. Continue reading “Pork Chop in Tomato Sauce (Primo + Secondo)”
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