Before work tortellOni

Been meaning to do a recipe for the blog for ages, clearly i haven't managed it in a fair while...

It is actually more time consuming than you'd think - you gotta think of a half decent recipe you fancy cooking, gather all the ingredients, take snaps, cook, take more snaps, wash up the chaos and then search for about an hour for that bloody cable which connects your camera to laptop, then write it up.

not easy to fit in around restaurant hours (plus ave mostly been doing 6 days a week of late)...pretty obvious why not many chefs have blogs.

Anyhow, here's a somewhat rushed recipe i did before a late (2pm) start at work recently. I decided to do pasta, mainly because I've got a good Italian deli right nr my place (see G Gazzano & Sons here), & it had some really good looking sausages.

So sausage pasta it was....

Tortelloni with sausage meat & a quick tomato & basil sauce.

I'd have normally called them tortellini but after being corrected by a slightly snotty Italian waiter at Bocca Di Lupo (he re-pronounced everything i ordered back to me, as if we were speaking different languages...e.g I'd order "cassata" and he'd look at me an check that i meant "cassata" ...erm yeah, "cassata" please...!???).

Anyhow he was right on the oni -ini front; they're both the same shape it's just that "ini" are smaller than "oni", the ones below are the same size as the BDL ones...so tortelloni it is.

Pretty simple recipe, and fairly quick when you get used to the making of the pasta / folding bit.


Ingredients (serves 2)

Pasta (this is a basic recipe here but if you like it richer you can add more yolk than whole egg, just adjust the volume of egg / amount of flour accordingly with experience):

• 200g Italian pasta flour (type 'OO')
• 2 large organic free range eggs
• dash of EV olive oil

Stuffing

• 2 - 3 Italian sausages
• 1 - 2 shallots, chopped fine
  
• a little beaten egg
• a some herbs or flavourings e.g few fennel seeds, chilli flakes, little chopped fresh thyme or rosemary etc
• Parmesan
  

Sauce:

• 1 punnet of cherry tomatoes, cut in half
  
• EV olive oil
• a clove of garlic, finely chopped
  
• a bunch of basil, leaves picked
  

Method:

Make pasta dough - if you already know how to knock up fresh pasta then skip this and use your favourite method:

• i almost always use a food processor for this for ease (and because most restaurants I've worked in do too), though if your processor is huge you might want to do by hand if your doing the smallish quantity above.
• Processor method basically = sieve flour in to processor bowl, add pinch salt and splash of oil, mix your eggs in bowl then tip in and pulse until well mixed (should form tiny balls), tip out on to work surface and push together to form ball of dough.
• Knead a little and cover with cling film and, ideally, rest for an hour (now you get your filling made, and get the stuff ready for your sauce - see below).
• Cut the dough in 2 and keep one piece aside (covered).
• Roll out your pasta to the thinnest setting on the machine, you can do this through any method you please but i think best results come from the folding and turning method (see guide by Giorgio here).
• Cut resulting long sheet sheet into squares about width of a credit card. Put a portion of filling in middle of each then brush around with a little water or beaten egg and fold (see here), place on some clingfilm or lightly floured surface until ready to cook.

Filling:

• Take the skin off the sausages and roughly chop / crumble the meat.
  
• Sweat the finely chopped shallot off in little olive oil or even butter, add any herb, fennel seeds or whatnot now and then the meat making sure you break it up in the pan so it doesn't clump up. Cook for a couple of mins or until just cooked through. Tip in to a bowl to cool.
• When cooled a bit add a touch of beaten egg to bind, a generous grating of Parmesan and taste to check seasoning.
• Put in fridge to chill before you use to stuff pasta.

A note on the tortelloni / ini thing here: an Italian friend Alessio (chef from Nahm, previously worked at Locanda etc) informs me that meat stuffings for tortelloni are cooked first (like i did here - phew!) whereas with tortellini meat is put inside raw (because they're so small that it cooks through in time that pasta does).

To finish:

• Get a large pan of salted water boiling ready for the pasta.
• Make the sauce by frying the chopped garlic in a large frying pan with a generous glug of olive oil, add the cherry tomatoes and cook until just collapsing, season then stir through the basil.
• Drop the pasta in to the water, cook for a couple of minutes only then transfer them with a slotted spoon to the sauce, toss together and cook for another minute in the frying pan and serve with grated Parmesan and perhaps another drizzle of nice EV olive oil.
  

Chorizo salad (& a new camera!)

Finally, i've bought a half decent camera...a digital SLR with macro lens.

I barely know one end of the camera from the other yet but am going to enjoy learning and putting the results up here etc.

So here's the very 1st pics from it - hot off the press (it's basically what i just ate for lunch). Plenty of room for improvement but, compared to my old camera, the diff is huge.

Chorizo salad with chickpeas, tomatoes & roast pattypan squash:

Rough recipe: i cut a couple of pattypans each in to about about 8 pieces and roasted with some garlic, thyme, quartered onions, seasoning and olive oil - for about 20 mins in hot oven. Meanwhile i cooked some slices of good quality soft chorizo in a pan, deseeded and sliced few plum tomatoes, chopped a little red chilli and couple of spring onions....to this i then added a tin of drained chickpeas and plenty of roughly chopped parsley and mint, oh and the zest of one orange. Little red wine vinegar/lemon juice, seasoning and good olive oil and toss through.

Couple more pics...

Sausages with roast peppers, tomatoes & chickpeas

Here’s one of my oldest, and easiest, recipes. A firm favorite during my student years.

It’s simple, tasty, quick and can be scaled up for large numbers no problem.

Just put it all in the middle of the table and let people dig-in.

Ingredients (with bread and salad this will serve 3 – 4):

o 8 decent sausages (Merguez are perfect, but any herby or spicy sausage is good, soft/uncooked Chorizo works really well too)
o 1 large onion
o 2 teaspoons of smoked paprika (substitute cayenne pepper, dried or fresh red chilli if you like)
o 3 cloves of garlic
o 2 - 3 large roasted red peppers or 5 or 6 smaller pointy ones – roast your own by blackening them on the hob / under the grill (see pic) and then skinning, or buy a jar of ready-roasted ones


o 1 tin of good quality chickpeas
o 2 tins of good quality chopped tomatoes, or a big jar of passata
o A pinch of sugar, salt and pepper
o A little olive oil
o 1 bunch of fresh parsley or coriander

Method:

You’ll need a small to medium sized baking or oven-proof dish. Put the oven on to preheat (to about 200 degrees C).

Slice the onion and finely chop the garlic, take a pan and start to fry them in a splash of olive oil on a medium heat. After about 5 minutes they should be nicely soft, so add the paprika or chilli and, if you have them, throw in a bay leaf and few parsley stalks now too.

Cook for 2 more minutes then add the tinned tomatoes and pinch of sugar along with some salt and pepper to taste. Bring up to the bubble and then chuck in to your oven proof dish.

Take your roasted red peppers, whether bought or homemade, and tear them in to large pieces, chuck them into the oven dish along with the chickpeas (drained of their water).

Slice the sausages in half at an angle and place them on top of the oven dish mix pushing ‘em down into the sauce a bit.

Place the dish on the top self of the oven for about 30 mins, or until the sausages are totally cooked with some nice color on top.

Remove from the oven, chop up the fresh herbs and scatter over the top.

Great with bread, salad and red wine.











N.B you can vary this in lots of different ways, such as:

o Using beans instead of chickpeas - butter or cannelloni are great.

o An Italian version - by removing the paprika and using fresh Italian sausages and finishing with basil instead of coriander. Perhaps even dot around torn pieces of mozzarella when there’s 10 mins more cooking to go.

o Or Moroccan style - by using the Merguez sausages, chickpeas, using cumin and normal paprika as the spices, cracking whole eggs in to the sauce (as above when there’s 10 mins more cooking to go) and finishing it with coriander.