Simple: Pasta al pesto trapanese

Another very SIMPLE thing, this time it's accidentally vegan, super-Italian and super-
avanti.


Tools:

Pot
Strainer
Blender
Knife
Cutting board
Wooden spoon /Long spoon


Ingredients:

Dried pasta (Penne rigate work well)
Tomatoes
Fresh basil
Fresh garlic
Almonds (best ground or granulated)
Salt
Pepper
Olive oil


Preparation:

1.
Put pot with water on stove. When it boils, put the pasta in.
2.
Gather and measure all the other ingredients.
Peel the garlic, remove the stems and stalks from the tomatoes and cut them
all up roughly.
Put them all into the blender and shred them to smithereens into a lovely pesto
that looks like baby vomit.
3.
When the pasta is done, strain it and put it back into the pot. Do not put it
back onto the stove. Mix the pesto into the pasta.

Done.


Tips:
This dish can be reheated in a pot.

Bacon Cookies

These are savoury little biscuits/cookies with onion and bacon. They taste best fresh out of the oven, but they keep well in a closed container and are a very practical and well-liked party snack.
Here goes:


Ingredients:

125g cold butter (4,4 oz)
250g flour (8,8 oz)
1 egg
1 pinch of salt
1 onion
100g bacon (3,5 oz)
1 pinch of nutmeg
1 egg yolk (or stirred egg)


Preparation:

Knead butter, flour, egg and salt into dough and let it cool in the fridge for half an hour.
Peel and chop onion into tiny bits and do the same to the bacon. Fry both a bit. Then drain them in a sieve or a towel and let them cool.
Knead the onion-bacon mixture into the dough with the nutmeg and form about 4cm (1,6") thick rolls of it. Wrap them in tin foil and leave them in the fridge for at least 1 hour.
Turn on the oven to 200 degrees Celsius (392 F), cut dough penises into slices and place on the parchmented (or not) baking tray, then brush the egg yolk (or stirred egg) on the little buggers and shove everything into the oven. It'll take about 15 minutes for them to become awesome.

Enjoy and serve at parties.



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Tips:

Experiment with additional spices like paprika, garlic or chili.

Experiment without bacon or onion, with different meats or vegetables, cheese, whatever you can come up with.

Experiment with different kinds of flour; white, full grain, rye, spelt...




I'm here for questions and comments!

Basic: Aïoli

Aïoli is a mediterranean dip, a kind of mayonnaise with a lot of garlic in it to make it even tastier.
You eat it with fresh, warm baguette or ciabatta, in small amounts it goes well with shrimp, crab and lobster and you can basically dip anything into it that has a strong enough taste of its own to not be overpowered by the aïoli's garlic tang.

Let's get to it.


Ingredients.

Egg yolk (several)
Mustard (a little)
Garlic
Vegetable oil
Olive oil
Lemon juice
Vinegar
Salt
Pepper


Tools.

Handheld mixer/blender
2 high bowls or plastic cups, one for garlic puree, the other larger for the aïoli itself
Bowl or any small container for leftover egg whites
Spoons
Beaker
Small knife
Kitchen knife
Cutting board


Preparation.

1. Peel a bulb of fresh garlic (small knife) and cut the cloves up roughly (kitchen knife, cutting board). Put them into the smaller of your two containers and add one or two tablespoons full of vegetable oil and olive oil.
Use your handheld blending stick/mixer to puree the little bastards into oblivion. Or just until they are a runny paste. Add more oil if it's too dry and tough. It's supposed to be an oily mash in the end.

2. Separate yolks and whites of three or more eggs (have more in reserve!) and put the yolks into the larger of your containers.
Store or pour away your egg whites.

3. Beat the yolks foamy with your handheld blender, then add a little mustard, some of your garlic puree, salt and pepper. A tiny bit of lemon juice and vinegar.

4. Put your container on a surface where it can sit tight and not slip around when you use the blender, because now you'll need both your hands.
Open your bottle of vegetable oil.

5. Whirr your egg mix again and pour in oil while mixing.
The mix has to become thicker, until it has the consistency of mayonnaise. Taste it and if need be, adjust the seasoning with garlic puree, salt, vinegar and lemon juice. Careful with the latter two!
If it doesn't become thick and creamy but stays thin liquid with loose specks of egg and mustard in it, it's taken a wrong turning and adding more oil won't make a difference. You'll have to start again with new yolks and do it from scratch. However, if this time your aïoli turns out to work, you can add some of your previous try and just mix it in.




Tips:

To make mayonnaise, leave out the garlic and olive oil.

Separating eggs:
- Wash your hands thoroughly and wipe the egg shells off carefully before you crack them open. Slipping over the shell and your hands will contaminate the eggs with bacteria and this matters here because the eggs stay raw in aïoli.

- Use something sharp, hard and slender to crack them open. Not the corner of the table or the rounded rim of your plastic bowl - use the blunt side of a knife blade or the flat, sharp rim of a metal bowl so that the crack is clean and skinny and easy to open the egg without crushing the shell completely.

- Either roll the yolk back and forth between the two halves of eggshell until the white has run out or pour the whole egg into your hand and let the white run off between your fingers.

Aïoli can keep surprisingly long, despite the raw egg. You can store it in the fridge for a week at least. Cover it up.

I'm there for questions and comments.

Simple Recipe: (Basics) Balsamico Vinaigrette

This recipe is not for a whole dish, but for a salad sauce.
Vinegar-based salad dressing is called vinaigrette.
Anyone with a handheld mixer can make this.
Measurements are metric (litric ;P ).
TS = tablespoon
ts = teaspoon

Try this balsamico vinaigrette as dressing/sauce with:
- Regular salads with lettuce and so on
- Fried or mashed potatoes
- Eggs (fried or boiled)
- Tomato and mozzarella


Ingredients (500 ml/ 0,5 litres):

100 ml dark balsamico vinegar
100 ml olive oil
50 ml vegetable oil
50 g honey
1 ts mustard
100 g sugar
1/2 ts pepper
1 ts - 1/2 TS salt
a tiny spit of water


Tools:

High cup/container to mix everything
Spoons
Handheld mixer/blender


Preparation:

1. Measure everything and put it into the mixing container/cup.

2. Mix that shit until it's one lovely thick brown liquid.

3. Taste it and check if you have enough (or too much) pepper, salt or mustard.
If too much: Whirr in more oil.



Tips:

This keeps for a very long time.

Simple Recipe: (Almendra) Gato

Greetings. This recipe is for a ridiculously simple but high class almond cake. It is soft, juicy, delicious and not exactly cheap, and the reason is that it is almost entirely made of almonds and sugar.
Any idiot can make this cake.
Here we go:


Ingredients:

250 g sugar
250 g ground almonds/almond meal/almond semolina
6 eggs
Grated skin of 1/2 lemon
Butter for the cake tin


Tools:

Bowl
Springform
Baking paper
Brush to butter the tin (optional)
Whisk (regular, kitchen aid, handheld - whatever)
Rubber or silicone spatula (optional)
(Scales)
Grater


Preparation

1.
Heat the oven to 120°Celsius.

2.
Prepare your cake tin with baking paper on the bottom and butter it all up (brush or hands).

3.
Measure all the ingredients and mix them (bowl, whisk) into a homogenous mass. The harder and longer you whisk/beat/mix it, the fluffier it will become.

4.
Pour the dough into the cake tin (you can get every last bit out of the bowl using the optional spatula). Bake it at 120°C for about 45 minutes.
Adjust the time to whichever gives you the best result with your oven.


----

Tips:

Not so much a tip as a warning: Almond semolina/meal is much more expensive than wheat flour. This is not a cheap cake.

Let it cool for a bit before opening the tin.
After removing the frame, place a plate or board on top of the cake and turn it upside down. Then remove the bottom of the cake tin and carefully peel off the baking paper. It's easier the more the cake has cooled off.

You can keep it in the fridge.

You can freeze it.

Wash the lemon before grating its skin off.
Avoid shaving off the white tissue. It's bitter.
Avoid shaving off parts of your own skin while grating.

Basics: Sweet short pastry

This must be the very simplest of all simple baking recipes in the history of ever.

Tools:

Hands
Kitchen scales
Knife
Baking tray or flat bowl
Tinfoil or clingfilm

Ingredients - the so-called "1-2-3 recipe":

3 parts flour (150 g)
2 parts butter (100 g)
1 part sugar (50 g)

1.
Measure the ingredients and cut the cold butter into small pieces.
Put everything into the broad bowl or onto the baking tray.

2.
Wash your hands thoroughly (fingernails) and knead the flour, sugar and butter into a smooth dough. It will seem very dry at first, but I promise you, it's not. Just keep kneading.

3.
When you have a smooth, homogenous dough, wrap it in the foil or clingfilm and put it into the fridge for at least half an hour.

----

Tips:

You can use this dough for cookies in all shapes and baked pastry cases for tarts and tartlets.

If you want to make cookies, depending on their thickness they will need 7-12 minutes at 170° Celsius. They should still be a bit soft when you take them out, and still be pale.

If you want to make simple round cookies you can roll the dough into cylinders/sausages right away, roll those into the foil and cool them like that so you can simply cut them into cookies later on.

For baked pastry cases/tartlet cases: Poke a few holes into the flat dough to prevent air bubbles. You may poke into any bubbles that come up anyway.

The longer you leave the dough in the refridgerator, the harder it will be when you take it out again. You can leave it overnight or for several hours, but then you'll have to take it out a few hours before working with it.

Why cool it in the fridge in the first place? Because after you knead it for ten, twenty minutes, it will be soft and handwarm, and that makes it hard to work with and damages the quality slightly, because the warmth affects the butter. It separates the fat from the whey.

With (much) less flour, you can use the same ingredients to make the butter layer and crumbles for streusel cake.

5-course menu pictures

Here's a 5-course menu I made a while ago.

I might add recipes later.

 

Amuse gueule: Tamagonigiri.

Sweet omelette on sticky rice with nori
and soy sauce (not in the picture)

Clear tomato soup with spinach-ricotta raviolo.

Pakoras on garden salad with vinaigrette.

(Vegetables fried in spiced dough on various kinds of salad with a simple vinegar-oil dressing.)

Fried cod filet with sauce hollandaise and green and white asparagus.

Grilled rack of lamb with its own sauce, ratatouille and rosemary potatoes.

Orange soufflé with chocolate shavings and chocolate sauce.