You don't make friends with salad!

Or so the saying goes. So it's lucky that last night when I had a couple of people around for dinner, they were all already old friends, because basically all I served was salad.

In my defense, I had spent the better part of the afternoon drinking beer and eating BBQ shapes in the park for my sister's birthday, so it's not that I didn't want to cook up a storm, so much as I just didn't have the time.

That having been said, it was a very successful dinner. I love having friends who love to eat - not in a really foodie, always searching out the hottest new chef or fanciest, most obscure ingredient kind of way, but in the, let's sit down and consume lots of tastey food and delicious wine all together kind of way.

Unfortunately I didn't manage to get many photos of the dishes I prepared, and the ones I did take weren't fantastic. But, in the interest of conscientious food blogging. Below is a shot of all the dishes served last night (except for dessert.) Clockwise from far left we have:
- roast beetroot, goats cheese, walnut and mixed leaf salad
- homemade humus (I haven't quite perfected that yet)
- zucchini and ricotta tart in a parmesan crust
- white bean, carrot and dill salad
- homemade roast eggplant and yogurt dip
- cheese
- cabbage, raddish apple and mustard seed coleslaw



The only non-salad item on the menu was a the savoury tart. Adapted from one of Heidi's recipe at 101 cookbooks - I'd made it once before with a wholemeal flour and olive oil crust but decided to get a little bit more decadent this time around and use another of Heidi's recipes for a parmesan crust. Sadly, even with the helped of a loaned food processor, the pastry dough recipe just didn't work for me. My dough never really came together properly and stayed kind of pebbley and sandy even when I was trying to squish it into the pie dish. Hmmm - so the recipe that I've given here is with a couple of my amendments to the pastry recipe and a couple of additions to the fillings.

Zucchini and Ricotta Tart
Adapted from 101 cookbooks

Pastry:
1/2 cup plain flour
1/2 cup wholemeal flour*
120g cold, unsalted butter chopped into 1cm cubes
120g good parmesan, finely grated
1/2tsp salt
2tbs ice cold water
1 egg yolk

Preheat the oven to 180c

Put the flours, salt, butter and parmesan in the bowl of a food processor and pulse a couple of times till it's just combined and some of the butter is still in pea sized pieces. Add the iced water 1 tablespoon at a time, and pulse a couple of times after each spoonful. Now add the egg yolk and again pulse until just combined.

The dough should come together when you pinch it between your fingers.

Pour the dough into a pie dish and quickly and firmly press it into the shape of the dish, pushing the dough up the sides of the dish as well.

Pop the dish in the fridge for 15 minutes. Pull it out, prick with a fork a couple of times, place a piece of silver foil over the pastry and weigh down gently with pie weights or dry beans. Pop it into the oven for 15 minutes. Take the pastry out of the oven, remove the foil and weights and continue baking for another 10 minutes or until the pastry is golden brown and smells delicious!

Allow to cool at least a little before filling.

*You can always use just plain flour for this recipe - the wholemeal flour just makes it a little bit more rustic. However, if you do use only plain flour I would omit the egg yolk from the recipe because it will probably make the dough too wet.

Filling:

2 medium zucchini - sliced into rounds as thinly as possible
2 cans chopped tomatoes
2 cloves garlic -sliced
2tbs olive oil
300g fresh ricotta
1tsp salt
1/2tsp red chili flakes
handful fresh basil

Either keep the oven hot from baking the pastry or preheat again to 180c

Place the chopped zucchini in a colander and sprinkle on a fair amount of salt. Leave the zucchini to sweat while you start the sauce.

In a small pot, heat up the oil, garlic and chili until it starts to get fragrant, but not allowing the garlic to burn.

Dump in the cans of tomato and simmer for 15 minutes. Salt to taste.

Pick up handfuls of the zucchini and squeeze them well to try and get rid of any excess moisture that's in them.

Take your cooked pastry crust and spread about half the ricotta on the bottom. Then spread about one third of the tomato sauce, followed by about half the zucchini and half the basil, roughly torn. Repeat this process and finish with the last 1/3 of tomato sauce on the top.

Pop it in the oven and let it cook for about 30mins.

Serve warm to friends or cold, directly from the fridge the next morning when you're faced with a sink full of dishes and need some courage!

For those of you who have perservered with this post all the way to the end of the recipe - you will now be rewarded with another photo - nothing food related, just some lovely flowers that have been sitting on the ledge above my kitchen sink the last couple of days... they're really very pretty!

I love you, dessert.

On my 20th birthday, one of my oldest male friend proposed marriage to me – quite seriously.

We were sitting on my parent's porch, enjoying the sunshine after a particularly indulgent Italian feast in honour of my birthday, and he just popped the question! I looked at him, somewhat startled, and then my eyes rested on the now scrapped clean dish sitting next to him on the table – it was the dish that once contained tiramisu – my tiramisu – and it all made sense. After all, while the old saying might be “the best way to a man’s heart is through his stomach”, I think “the best way to a man’s heart is through his taste buds” might be more accurate!

Lunch that day was a seriously Italian affair that I had spent 2 days cooking up. Bruschetta, homemade pasta, cherry tomato sugo – which required the painstaking de-seeding of about 2kg of cherry tomatoes, homemade pesto, cheese plates, salads and the crowning glory – two enormous tiramisu! Tiramisu good enough to make you fall in love!

To be completely honest, unlike some of my other Italian fare, I didn’t pick up my tiramisu recipe from anywhere authentic, but rather from a beautiful Italian cookbook my sister gave me.. Nevertheless, it's a recipe that proved seriously successful time and again, and now that I’ve moved out of my parent’s home and that cookbook sadly remained behind (I really should remember to re-claim it next time I’m there) its simple perfection has stayed with me and I no longer even need the recipe to whip one up.



So, for a while, I made my tiramisu at every opportunity, every birthday, picnic, family dinner or general event that called for dessert, I beat some eggs, brewed some coffee and dunked a couple of savoiardi. And then I don’t know what happened but tiramisu kind of disappeared from my repertoire, that is, it had disappeared, until last weekend, when another old friend who was obviously missing the good old days of layered Italian desserts, requested a tiramisu for her end of exams/birthday dinner party.

Even without the cookbook – the tiramisu came back to me like an old friend, once again I beat some eggs, brewed some coffee and dunked a couple more biscuits.

When dinner time came around, my tiramisu was delicious as ever, slightly sweet, a little bitter, lightly boozed and very creamy. In fact, I think it was probably delicious enough that those left over biscuits in my pantry will making another appearance as tiramisu in the not too distant future!




Tiramisu

Makes 1 enormous tiramisu, 2 smaller ones or about 15 individual tiramisu if you want to do them in pretty glasses or ramekins.

Ingredients
8 eggs separated (the eggs in tiramisu are raw, so get the freshest possible free range eggs you can – like those gorgeous yolks you can see in the picture above)
150g caster sugar
750g mascarpone
3 cups strong brewed coffee (plunger or espresso coffee diluted)
3tbs brandy, sweet Marsala or booze of choice
100g dark chocolate, finely grated
2 packs Savoiardi (lady/sponge finger biscuits) – about 40 biscuits

Method
Beat the egg yolks with the sugar until it becomes thick and pale.

Beat the egg whites in a clean, dry bowl with a pinch of salt until it forms soft peaks.

Whip the marscapone (about 1/3 at a time) into the egg yolk mixture.

Gently fold the egg whites into the yolk/marscapone mixture (you probably need to do this in about 4 batches) Be as gentle as possible at this stage, try and keep as much of the air in the mixture as possible.

Mix the brandy into the coffee – it should taste like very strong coffee and quite strongly of brandy, the flavour of the alcohol will mellow as the tiramisu sets in the fridge.

One at a time, dunk the biscuits into the coffee mixture. The trick is to get them nice and sodden without them falling apart. I like to do 4 seconds on each side, although it probably depends on the size and brand of your biscuits.

Layer the bottom of a clean baking dish with the soaked biscuits.

Spoon over about half of the marscapone mixture.

Repeat in layers until all biscuits and marscapone are used up (the last layer should be
marscapone not biscuit) I usually only do two layers of each.

Pop it into the fridge for at least 2 hours, but preferably 8 or even overnight.

Sprinkle the grated chocolate over the top just before serving.

Artichokes across the seas

I have a lovely friend who has gone to live overseas. In fact I have a number of lovely friends who are living very far away at the moment, but I’ve been missing one in particular a lot recently, and largely because I recently bought a new cook book. Hmmm, that doesn’t sound like it would make you miss a friend really does it, maybe I need to explain a little more.

The book I bought is My Cousin Rosa, by Rosa Mitchell. Rosa runs “Rosa’s Kitchen” or “Journal Canteen” or “that little place upstairs next to CAE”, and my lovely friend loves to lunch at Rosa’s – and I can’t blame her. Like the restaurant, Rosa’s book is full of homely, simple, rustic and delicious Sicilian recipes, and, like eating in the restaurant, the book makes you feel as if Rosa may really be your cousin, sharing family stories and memories about food and life growing up in an Italian family in Melbourne.

So with thoughts of friends far away, I bought some new season artichokes and set to work on a special Rosa recipe – Sicilian stuffed artichokes. Served at room temperature as part of a antipasto type meal on a warm Saturday evening with a glass of wine, these artichokes were delicious... perhaps almost good enough to bring a friend home to try a taste.



Carciofi ripeni - Stuffed artichokes
Adapted from My Cousin Rosa by Rosa Mitchell

2 globe artichokes (they should be firm with tight rather than wilting or separated leaves)
2 slices stale ciabatta or similar finely chopped or whizzed in the food processor into coarse crumbs
½ bunch flat leaf parsley finely chopped
1 clove garlic minced
¼ cup grated grana padano or similar
1 egg lightly beaten
1 lemon
Olive oil
1 can tomatoes
Salt and pepper

Preheat the oven to 180c

Trim off the top third of the artichokes and chop off the stem right at the base. Keep the top 2-3 cms of the stem and peel it - discard the rest. As soon as you’ve trimmed the artichokes and peeled the stem, throw them in a bowl of water with the juice of 1 lemon and the bit of reserved – they discolour very quickly and this will help to stop that.

In a small bowl mix together breadcrumbs, parsley, garlic and cheese.

Take one of the artichokes and roll it around on the kitchen bench with a bit of pressure from the heel of your hand to open up the leaves a little. This actually didn’t work particularly well for me, so I was just more forceful with the stuffing.

Take small handfuls of the breadcrumb mixture and stuff it in between the layers of leaves. You’ll have to really stuff hard. Try to get some in between each of the layers – or just distribute the stuffing throughout the artichoke as much as possible. Repeat with the other artichoke.

Heat some olive oil in a pan and dip the top of each artichoke into the egg. Quickly pop them egg-side down into the hot oil. This is to seal the stuffing in the artichoke and will only take a minute or two.

While they’re frying, empty a can of tomatoes into a small baking dish, along with a good grind of pepper and salt, and maybe a bay leaf if you’re feeling fancy.

Take the artichokes out of the pan and place them egg side up in the tomatoes. Throw the stems into the tomato, cover the whole lot tightly with silver foil and bake for about an hour, or until a skewer goes through the centre of an artichoke easily.

Eat with some crusty bread and a salad for lunch or along with some other antipasto delicious bits and pieces for a leisurely dinner.

Enjoy with good friends, near and far.