Lasagne night

Welcome back to the second edition of Monday is Monday. Still trying to find the right format, voice, style, any suggestions are welcome. Whence comes Monday night ? We pinned it down to somewhere in the fall of 2006, when P was living here, M was back in school nearby and unfortunately it was near the time when our friend Mark Blanco was killed, as J remembered. These dinners have been, and still are, a good place to be with old and new friends and with the food also share some of our stories, adventures and misadventures.

At the beginning, on monday nights, P would buy some food and I would come back from work and improvise on the day's ingredients. That worked well when there were just the four musketeers, then more guests arrived and a bit more planning was required and then with time it became a self fulfilling tradition.

Tonight's dinner conversation spanned many topics, from f**ed up family dynamics to gun control (or the lack thereof) and related bumper stickers in the US, and Sarah Palin of course. We're taking bets on how long it will take for her to get sued and for someone on fox, or related, to announce that the recent shooting in Arizona was all part of a democrats' conspiracy to undermine the tea party.

And now on to the food. I know what you're thinking. No, I'm not going to divulge our family secret ragù sauce recipe. And by the way, in Italy there are as many secret ragù recipes as there are families, like gaspacho in Spain, chili con carne in the US or ratatouille in France. I can give you a few suggestions if you'd like to come up with your own family secret traditional recipe. First of all, take your time, it will cook at least three hours, if possible the day before you eat it. Use more than one kind of meat if possible, and not lean meat, some dishes are not supposed to be lean, and this is one of them. If you like a gamey taste you could add some chicken livers, sausage or dried porcini mushrooms. Some people put white or red wine, others milk, before adding the tomatoes. Do not use tomato paste. It is possible to not use tomatoes at all ... we made it that way once with my father, I remember it took a long time, but in the end you get a sauce which is basically the essence of the meat. It can only go on home made pappardelle.


Roasted vegetable lasagne. This one is not a secret, I think I originally got it from The Joy of Cooking. The trick is to roast all the vegetables together in a very hot oven with olive oil, rock salt and oregano. This makes a very nice sauce at the bottom of the roasting pan where all the vegetable flavors mix oh so smoothly. After that you can use beshamel sauce, and ricotta and mozzarella to make your layers. I didn't use beshamel this time, and I used some arrabbiata tomato sauce and ricotta. Sprinkle parmesan and mozzarella on top before baking. Be careful not to burn your tongue ! It's very hot !


Dessert, as usual, was S's creation, and appropriately for the season it was galette des rois. I got the feve ! (and thus the crown) It was one of the characters from Harry Potter 7 ! (see photo above) What has this world come to !


Special guest: airman from Bangalore
Cooking soundtrack: FIP radio station
Dinner soundtrack: Regina Spector, Marylin Monroe and Bob Dylan (freewheelin)

First monday of the year

No photos. It wasn't pretty. Honey mustard pork chops, brussels sprouts and pommes sarladaises and to finish it off a delicious broken up strawberry pie. Good stuff.
Just the boys and me tonight. Guest appearance by the man with the hat. Spent a lot of time talking about a goat behind a door.
All done cleaning up, good night and good luck !

Fish Ravioli

Let's see if I remember how I made these ... these are fish-filled ravioli. The filling is made by sauteing some shallots then adding some cod in small chunks passed through flower, salt pepper, brandy and white wine. Had some sourdough bread that I put in, in small pieces, to soak up any of the excess liquid. That's it I think. One of the recipes I had look at for inspiration said to put all this in a blender, I didn't, I prefer a chunkier texture, and in any case once you start mixing it breaks up into almost a paste. I think you can put any fish you like, shrimp, swordfish, tuna ...

The pasta, my eternal conundrum about ravioli, if I use the #5 setting in the pasta machine it's too thick, if I use the #6 it's too thin ... and when it is thin you need to have a very strong pasta, which I didn't have the other day, so I had to go with the thick option... will try again next time, but they taste very good anyway.

The sauce, the story behind this is that, low and behold, incredibly, after a recent dinner I realized that there was half a bottle of champagne left over ! Had to run to the airport the next morning, no time for mimosas, corked it and put it in the fridge. All the meanwhile during my travels across Italy visiting relatives I wondered about that precious champagne in my fridge and how I could use it for cooking up something fancy. The first thing that came up to mind was a spuma di gamberi allo champagne, which is like a shrimp-flavoured mousse... found a possible recipe for a sweet champagne mousse for dessert, but in the end I went for the scallop champagne cream sauce for the ravioli. There are various versions on the internet. I tried the one where you sauté the shallots and some mushrooms, take them out of the pan, add in the (frozen) scallops, once they are thawed and lost most of their water put back the mushrooms and then add the champagne. Low heat 10 mins, (be careful with the scallops, it's better if they don't overcook if possible) take out scallops and mushrooms and let the sauce reduce to half. Add cream and one or two egg yolks. Now, this last step, with the egg yolks, I don't think it came out exactly right, maybe it would have been better to mix the cream and yolks before adding them to the sauce. In any case, the friends said it tasted very good ! (I have very nice friends :-)  )

Happy 2011 !

Happy New Year everyone ! This is a dried fruit cake I made for New Year's dinner. It's called a Zelten and it comes from the Trentino region of Italy. It is rich and wintery, but not too sweet and still very fluffy. The story is that a couple of friends had brought dried fruits as gifts to monday night dinners and so I went looking for a way to turn them into a cake. This recipe I found on the Giallo Zafferano web site, an often very useful italian cooking site. I modified/simplified a bit maybe since I did not put nuts inside or raisins, I just used dried figs and apricots, didn't have rum to soak them in so used a bit of leftover brandy from the fish filling of the ravioli (see below) and some very nice moscato wine. I have the feeling that this is a pretty flexible recipe that will tolerate many vairations.