The quiche that wasn't

Ok, so I’ve been fairly slack lately with the whole blogging thing. What, with all the Christmasing, camping, beaching, beering and sleeping, there’s been little time for computers. Luckily though, that doesn’t mean that I’ve been slack on the cooking, in fact, I’ve got quite a backlog of photos and recipes to share with you guys, which is also lucky, because the last couple of days have brought the sort of weather that makes you want to run screaming from the kitchen and eat cold watermelon for breakfast, lunch and dinner – which although delicious, does not make for particularly interesting blog material!

One of these backlogged recipes is a savoury ricotta tart. I feel a bit silly calling it a “savoury ricotta tart” – considering it’s made up of eggs, cheese, herbs and a bit of asparagus in pastry, it’s probably more suiting to call it quiche, but the thing is, I hate quiche, and I love this! Well, I don’t flat out hate quiche – as a kid I used to eat it fairly frequently as part of Sunday lunch at my grandparent’s farm and I used to really enjoy picking off the pastry crust and eating it with tomato sauce – it was just the gluggy, eggy middle bit that turned me off. Luckily quiche was always served with at least three different salads at my grandparents’ – a green, a coleslaw and a brown rice salad, I was hardly deprived, starving child, forced to pick at quiche crusts for lunch.

Anyway, I digress – the point is that this tart is really delicious! It’s a bit rustic, light, fresh and even works beautifully when you slip into holiday laziness and use (gulp) bought pastry. I think the thing that really distinguishes it is that the majority of the filling is beaten ricotta, rather than eggs, the eggs are really just used to hold the whole mess together, this makes for a much lighter filling, both in flavour and texture.

This is the perfect sort of food for summer, it’s quick to make, doesn’t require the oven to be on for too long and tastes even better eaten cold the next day, so if you’re sweltering in summer heat, get to it!




Savoury Ricotta Tart

Also, I should say, feel free to be imaginative with the herbs and veggies that you put in this. The first time I made it was with spring onion and fresh thyme and a sprinkle of dried oregano, which was very good, but simpler than the recipe given here. I think I’ll be making this again a far bit and will be experimenting with throwing in some spinach and dill, and maybe some peas and fresh mint in the future – really, the possibilities are endless.

1 sheet/1 quantity shortcrust pastry*
200gm ricotta cheese (preferably not from the tub)
150gm soft goats cheese**
2 eggs lightly beaten
1 bunch spring onions – finely chopped
¼ cup flat leaf parsley – finely chopped
1 bunch asparagus - trimmed
1tsp dried thyme or a couple of springs fresh thyme, leaves removed and chopped, stems discarded
Salt and pepper

Preheat the oven to 180c

Line a 24cm tart tin (or springform cake tin) with the pastry and blind bake (quick refresher – blind baking is when you pop the raw pastry in the tin, then a sheet of baking paper over the top and fill the tin with raw rice or beans/chickpeas and bake for 10mins or so, then remove from oven, take out weights and paper and pop it back in the oven for 5mins. This cooks the pastry through a bit before filling and stops it from getting too soggy or puffing up too much.)

Bring a pot of water to the simmer, salt well and drop in the asparagus. Pull them out again after just 30 seconds and refresh in cold water.

Beat together all remaining ingredients with a fork.

Chop the asparagus into 2cm pieces.

Pour half the cheese mixture into the pastry crust.

Throw the asparagus on top of this – try and create an even-ish layer

Pour remaining cheese mixture into the crust

Pop the whole thing in the oven for 25-30mins or until it’s brown on top and just set in the middle – so it will still jiggle a bit.

Serve warm with some delicious salads (recipes to come soon) for a light summer dinner, or cold, from the esky, in the car on the way to a music festival the next day.

* As I mentioned, I was lazy and used bought shortcrust pastry - it actually worked really well, but if I was feeling more energetic I would use this pastry recipe, without the sugar.
** You could substitute a number of things for the goats cheese here, cream cheese or some grated aged pecorino. I'd love to get really decadent and use Meredith marinated feta in this - YUM!

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!

Didn't your mother ever tell you...

That too many cherries will give you a tummy ache?!



Mine did – but that didn’t stop me gorging myself on kilos of them last weekend when we went cherry and berry picking in Silvan, near the Dandenongs, about 45 minutes outside of Melbourne.

We paid $7 entry to cover the cherries that we would eat whilst picking (oh boy did I make sure I got my money’s worth), were handed a bucket and pointed in the direction of heavily fruit-laden cherry trees at the end of the track.



Ever wondered why cherries are so bloody expensive? It’s because picking them is a seriously labour intensive activity! It takes a loooong time to fill 2 buckets with cherries, especially if like me, you adopt the “one for you, one for me” method of picking.

After the cherries came the blackberries and raspberries. What a revelation! What amazing, beautiful, tasty little morsels! I hate to sound so much like an inner-city girl, but seeing those deep red berries peeking out from behind the bushy leaves, looking like, well, flowers, and then popping them in your mouth and realising that it’s actually a raspberry, like, the same thing that comes in punnets at the supermarket seemed a little ridiculous but very wonderful!

We headed home with our bountiful bounty, stuffing a few more cherries and berries into my mouth on the way. Once home, I had rolled around on the floor for a while emitting cherry-tummy-ache induced moans and groans, and then decided that 7kg of fruit is too much for regular human consumption. There was only one thing for it – a jam session! After a quick tribute to Bob Marley, we got down to business: the very messy business of pitting cherries and the very dangerous business of sterilising jars.



Jam is really an incredibly easy thing to make – it’s really just equal quantities of fruit and sugar, juice of a lemon or two (and if it’s fruit without a lot of natural pectin – like cherries) a bit of extra pectin or jamsetta which you can easily pick up from the supermarket.

To quote my fellow jammer, “jam-making is an easy but fraught process” – so I’ve taken lots of photos for you to follow.

Home-made jam is an entirely different thing to supermarket jam! For one thing, it tastes like fruit rather than sugar, for another it's totally natural and therefore healthy ;) - so what are you waiting for? Don an apron, boil some jars, and get jamming!

For cherries, and all stone fruit the first step is to pit all the fruit. With cherries this can be a very messy business. I was lucky enough to be using an olive pitter which made life much easier, nevertheless it took about an hour to pit 3kg of cherries!



Next, throw all the fruit in the biggest pot you have along with an equal quantity of sugar - so we had 3kg of pitted cherries and 3kg of white sugar.



Put the pot onto a very low heat - you don't want the sugar to burn at all. Let the whole thing heat up very very slowly, stirring occasionally. The sugar will begin to dissolve and the cherries to release juices so it will start looking delicious and syrupy. At this stage, squeeze in some lemon juice - we used 2 lemons.



Continue to heat it all up, stirring to make sure it doesn't stick to the bottom and eventually the mixture will begin to hubble and bubble. At this stage, if you're using jamsetta/extra pectin, throw it in. Also, you'll find that the boiling produces a fair bit of foamy "scum" that rises to the top. Even though for us it was a hot pink foam that looked quite delicious, we skimmed it off because that's what you're meant to do when you're jamming.



To test if the jam is ready, splodge a bit on a plate and pop it in the freezer. If, after about 30secs the jam comes out set (no longer liquid but not quite a solid) your jam is ready. And so begins the dangerous part!

Gently and carefully remove all the jars that you've been sterilizing (by boiling on the stove for a while) from the hot water and place on a heat-proof surface.



At this stage you want to act as quickly as possible to make sure the jars are still hot and sterile when you pop the jam in. Quickly and carefully ladle the jam into the jars and wearing gloves or using a couple of tea towels, screw the jar lids on tightly.

Give the jars a good clean (because they'll inevitably get disgustingly sticky) and leave them on the benchtop to cool over night.




And taadaa - Jam!

Enjoy on toast, in baking, from a spoon or any other usual jam enjoyment activities which I will leave up to your imagination.

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.

A neanderthal dessert

There’s a story that my grandmother tells that has been told so many times that I can’t remember whether it was about me or my sister any more. My Savta (Hebrew for grandmother, and the only name I’ve ever known my paternal grandmother by) is a marvellous baker – she has ways with yeast that would make some of the fancy artisanal bakers popping up these days weak at the knees! So, she used to come to our primary school every now and then and do baking classes with the kids. We all loved it, but when Savta introduced herself to the class: “Hi everyone, I’m Savta”, the little girl in the story (me or my sister) became quite distressed claiming, “you’re not everyone else’s Savta, you’re only mine!”

So, we’ve obviously become more generous with our Savta-sharing over the past 20 years because last week we shared a special and all too rare baking afternoon with a couple of friends who were dying to learn her magical ways with yeast.

The cake of the day was Caveman Cake – which I think is actually supposed to be called something like Dumpling Cake – a Hungarian specialty that we have thus named because you never cut the cake, but rather rip off chunks with your hands and gobble as quickly as possible.

Thea brought along her wonderful fancy camera and was nice enough to take photos of the whole process for me – so I’ll try to illustrate the recipe as best I can with her gorgeous shots.

Caveman Cake

The thing with this cake is that it’s about perfecting the dough, which isn’t hard work but might mean a couple of failures and a couple of mediocre cakes before you get things right. The wonderful news is that when you’ve got this dough right, you can also use it to make delicious homemade donuts!

Dough

6g dry active yeast
1 tsp sugar
2tbs warm water
400g flour
2 egg yolks
50g butter (although Savta always uses margarine to make the cake suitable for eating after a meaty Friday night dinner, in accordance with Kashrut laws around mixing meat and milk)
250ml tepid water (for a richer cake you could substitute this with milk)
1 tsp salt
2 tbs caster sugar
¼ cup canola oil plus a bit more for greasing

Filling

120g walnuts
4-5 tbs apricot jam
100g sugar
Zest of 1 lemon

Mix the yeast, tsp of sugar and warm water in a large bowl and leave aside to proof.

Add all other dough ingredients to the bowl.

At this stage if you’re lucky enough to have a bench-top mixer, stick it in there with the dough hook attachment and let it go on medium for about 3 minutes.

After 3 minutes, slowly add the oil in a thin stream and let it be incorporated into the dough.

If you’re doing this by hand, it will be quite a wet, sticky and soft dough, so rub a bit of oil onto your hands as you work. You’ll probably have to knead for about 10 minutes and then slowly incorporate the oil.



Now it’s time to leave the dough alone in a warm place, let the yeast do its work and relax with “something prepared earlier” and a cup of tea.

Although there is a little bit of work to be done now – grind up the walnuts in the food processor and mix it with the sugar and lemon zest. Also, preheat the oven to 200c.



Once the dough has doubled, or even almost tripled (usually about 1 - 1.5 hours), tip it out of the bowl onto a well floured surface.

Handle the dough as little as possible because you want to keep all that precious air in there but flatten it out a bit to about an inch thick.



Using a cookie cutter or glass cut circles of dough out – make sure you use all the dough, fashioning odd shaped bits out of the cut-offs - because Savta would be very disappointed if you threw anything out!



Take a large, deep cake tin (any shape will do, Savta always uses a big square one) and sprinkle a bit of oil on the bottom.

Place a layer of the dough rounds on the bottom of the pan – they don’t need to overlap, and don’t even really need to touch because it’ll grow again before it goes in the oven.

Pop about a teaspoon sized blob of apricot jam on each round and sprinkle over half of the walnut mixture.

Repeat until all dough rounds have been used up – don’t put jam or walnut on the top layer, just brush it with some egg white or milk.



Leave the cake like this for about 20 minutes to rise a bit more and pop it into the hot oven for about 30mins or until it’s golden brown and springy to touch.

Pull it out of the oven, turn out onto a cooling rack.

Enjoy, tearing apart with your fingers as soon as it’s not going to give you third degree burns (although, even that would be worth it!)

Cheesy Potato Cure

Upon reading a title like “Cheesy Potato Cure” you could be forgiven for thinking that this post would contain stories of cold weather, long days in the office and the need for rich, stodgy comfort food, like Cheesy Potatoes to cure all the ills in the world... but you would be wrong. In fact, it is a post about what to eat as a cure when you've eaten too much greasy food and feel like, well a cheesy potato. I think I should go back a little bit and explain...

The term “Cheesy Potato” was coined what seems like an age ago when my lovely sister flew half way around the world to save me from dying of a broken heart, all alone, in Italy. Ok, so I was nineteen and probably a little melodramatic, but it was definitely a sad and lonely place to be.

We met up in Barcelona for what turned out to be a wonderful 10 days or so of touring, talking, drinking, healing and, of course eating. Only problem is, Spain is not such a friendly place for the vegetarian and over the course our time there we ate more bread, egg, potato, cheese and miscellaneous fried stuff than anyone could ever wish to. Not to mention all washed down with plenty of cerveza (which is really just more bread in liquid form!)

It was one day when we'd been wandering the Alhambra in Granada for untold hours and the lack of food was beginning to make us both a little hangry (hungry-angry) that we relented and ate a boccadillo (don't be fooled by the fancy name it is, you guessed it, bread filled with egg and potato) from the touristy food stall just outside the Alhambra. It was gross – stodgy, dry and greasy all at the same time. After inhaling the whole thing, Thea groaned “Urgh, I feel like a cheesy potato!” And so, a legend was born – from that point on, whenever too much unhealthy food has been consumed, we cry “Cheesy Potato”!!!

Now, there are a number of ways to cure this particular feeling. Often something as simple as a tart apple or a stick of celery will suffice to freshen up your insides and make you feel clean and sparkly again, but sometimes, a quick fix just won't do and a whole meal must be devoted to scrubbing the cheesy potato out of your system. These times call for something that make you feel virtuous and taste delicious, something that tastes green, something like the salad I made this week for dinner, and then again for lunch. Inspired by the sorrel I bought from the farmers market and the red quinoa bestowed upon me by Dave's mum, this salad was the perfect cure for my cheesy potato feeling brought on by an indulgent weekend in Tasmania and too many lunches and dinners out and about.



The beauty of this salad is that it is substantial enough to eat for dinner, stays fresh left overs, and lends itself very nicely to whatever variations of vegetables you have in your frigde – although I would have to say that if you can find a nice bunch of sorrel, use it – it's tangy and zingy yet earthy flavour is really something special.


Cheesy Potato Cure Salad – or Sorrel and Red Quinoa Salad

1 bunch fresh sorrel, washed, dried and cut into ribbons (you could also use rocket, spinach or a mixture of all three)
1 cup red quinoa (or other quinoa)
1 bunch spring onion, chopped into 1 cm pieces
½ avocado, sliced
1 small cucumber, chopped into half circles
1 tomato, diced
1 bunch asparagus, briefly blanched or steamed and chopped into 2cm pieces
100g feta cheese (optional)

Vinaigrette

1 tbs dijon mustard
3 tbs white wine vinegar
5 tbs olive oil


Rinse the quinoa well under running water for a minute or so (then take a shorter shower that night to off-set the guilt of running the tap for so long)

Pop the rinsed quinoa and 2 cups of water in a pot on the stove. Bring to the boil, stirring occasionally then reduce to a simmer, pop on a tight fitting lid and let it cook until almost transluscent and tender and all the water is absorbed. My packet of quinoa said 10-15 minutes but it took more like 20mins.

In the meantime, prepare all the veggies and whisk together all ingredients for the dressing in a small bowl.

Dump everything (except feta) into a big bowl, and pour all the dressing on top – toss well – at this stage, if you're not going to use the feta, add some salt to the salad too.

Crumble some feta on top and enjoy straight from the serving bowl.

Serves 2 people for a light dinner and the perfect cure to cheesey potato guilt.

Many kinds of happiness

There are many things in life that can make a girl happy; clean white sheets, dark chocolate, warm weather, dinner parties, just catching the last train, overalls, badedas bath gel and of course dumplings.

The wonderful thing about dumplings is that they come in so many different types and appear in so many different cuisines that you can be dumpling happy almost anywhere at any time of day!

There are dumplings that you eat down laneways in the city, drowned in vinegar and shared with friends, beer and a couple of rats. There are dumplings that you eat at your grandmother’s house which are doughy and crumbed and filled with sour plum jam so you’re never entirely sure whether they’re sweet or savoury.

And then there are dumplings that are more your style, full of ricotta, silverbeet and swimming in rich tomato sauce. Dumplings called malfatti that you make yourself and serve at home, inflicting serious dumpling happiness on your family and friends. For me they are the best dumplings of all!



Last night I cooked dinner at my parent’s place for my family and thought that these delicious (mostly) light little balls of ricotta and silverbeet would be the perfect food to serve up to a big hungry crowd. As it turns out, making these en masse is a fairly arduous task that included almost a kilo of ricotta, de-stemming steaming and chopping about 2 kilos of silverbeet and lots and lots of ball rolling. While some of the gorgeous little dumplings came out a bit soft and others a bit hard, they were, on the whole very yummy – particularly when paired with Marcella Hazan’s Crazy Tomato Sauce and some freshly grated parmesan. Here, I've been realistic and given a recipe that will generously serve 2 rather than 6 people.



Like all things dumpling, these should probably be enjoyed in moderation, but will more likely be scoffed and result in sighing and belly grabbing. It’s worth it, but don’t say I didn’t warn you!

Ricotta and Silverbeet Malfatti*

1 small(ish) bunch silverbeet (or rainbow chard or spinach etc)
350g fresh ricotta (not from the tub, it’s too wet)
2 eggs
1 ¼ cup plain flour
¼ cup grated parmesan
Salt, pepper and nutmeg to taste

Trim the silverbeet to remove the stems and any thick white veins so that you’re left just with the leafy bits.

Steam or briefly sauté in a bit of water for about 5 minutes until properly wilted.

Transfer to a bowl to let it cool until you can handle it then squeeze out as much moisture as possible. Finely chop the silverbeet and squeeze again (and again and again) to make it as dry and finely chopped as possible.

In a clean bowl mix together all the ingredients (but only a small amount of flour, about ½ cup)

Once well combined it should be wet but not too sticky, keep working in flour bit by bit until you have a dough that you can work into little balls without making a massive mess. At the same time, the more four you add, the chewier the dumplings will be, so this may take a couple of attempts to perfect.

Lay out a sheet of waxed baking paper, sprinkle with flour (I used semolina because I ran out of normal) and pop on a large pot of salted water to boil.

Take approximately ½- 1 tsp size pieces of the dough and roll into little balls, place on the baking paper - don't be tempted to make them bigger because they will swell a bit and these are the sort of thing that you just want to pop into your mouth, not cut in half first.

Once they’re all done, sprinkle a bit of extra flour on top of them all.

In two batches, gently plop the dumplings into lightly simmering water. When they bob up to the top, leave them for a minute and then pull them out with a slotted spoon. Repeat with the remaining dumplings.

Serve with rich tomato sauce, or some brown butter and sage and be dumpling happy.

* Malfatti means badly made in Italian - but I think mine looked lovely ;) these are also called Gnudi because they're like ravioli filling without the "jacket" of pasta