Daring Bakers: Lasagna of Emilia-Romagna

"A lasagne is a whole meal in itself" Mr A&N commented while helping with this month's challenge. "The only problem with it is that it takes about three meal's worth of time to make."

In between a fussy Baby A&N and tired A&N parents, the lasagne took a while to make and gave us our latest night dinner in months - 9pm, our now-normal bedtime. The grandest element of this lasagne, as hosted by the triumverate of Mary of Beans and Caviar, Melinda of Melbourne Larder, and Enza of Io Da Grande, was the spinach lasagne sheets. Made from scratch and involving a whole load of finely chopped spinach, the pasta turns you into the Incredible Hulk during the 10 minutes of kneading, as the green of the spinach seeps in to both the flour and egg mixture, and on to your hands.

The requirement was to roll the pasta out by hand, and frankly this was the most time consuming part, both to perform the task as well as to understand the instructions and get the hang of what you ought to be doing. I was covered in flour and pasta dough for what felt like several hours, and Mr A&N had to step in and make the meat sauce to prevent a midnight dining time rather than a 9pm one. The meat sauce was our own bog standard variety (onions, garlic, bit of celery and carrot, beef, tinned tomato and tomato pasta, and a dash of balsamic vinegar and worcestershire sauce for a bit of extra flavor) because, as Mr A&N likes to remind me, he's not one to follow the rules (except that he is, but I indulge him sometimes). It was a joint effort to assemble and bake it, and by the time it was in the oven we both felt we deserved that 40 minute slouch back on the sofa.

But all's well that ends in lasagne, and the finished product is a definite I'll-have-a-second-helping-even-if-it-means-a-later-bedtime wonder. Fresh pasta makes a huge difference to both texture and taste, giving a softer and richer final product. Not one you can make every weekend (unless the kids are behaving themselves and you're feeling particularly spry/hyped up on caffeine), but certainly worth the effort once it's done.


The March 2009 challenge is hosted by Mary of Beans and Caviar, Melinda of Melbourne Larder and Enza of Io Da Grande. They have chosen Lasagne of Emilia-Romagna from The Splendid Table by Lynne Rossetto Kasper as the challenge.

Pasta with Roast Cherry Tomatoes and Fennel

Sometimes you find life acting upon you more than you acting upon it. Work has been like that for me lately, with me coming home barely in time for a late dinner or in time (just) for a soothing cup of tea before bed time. There are only 4 more weeks until I start maternity leave so work won't continue like this for much longer, though a different kind of madness will hit after that.

Even without much time, you still have to eat, and I'd always rather my meal was home-made and leaving me wanting more even if given the time constraints it seems the stuff that dreams are made on. Roasting does amazing things to cherry tomatoes; if left at that, they'll make a bruschetta topping that any devotee of the red-white-and-green tricolor flag would be proud of. Using the roast tomatoes as a base to a pasta sauce transfers that magic to the main course.

In this case, I roasted the tomatoes along with thyme and sliced fennel, which is also intensified and sweetened by the roasting. When all the roasting pieces and juices are tossed together at the end it creates an improbably rich and meaty sauce (despite the absence of animal products) which defines the word umami with each mouthful. Not quite the same as a half day of work and a long soak in a bubble bath, but as easy dinners go, it comes close.

Pasta with Roast Cherry Tomatoes and Fennel
Serves 2 generously or 4 as an appetizer

• 1 fennel
• 3 cloves garlic
• 500g / 1lb of cherry tomatoes
• handful fresh thyme (or around tsp of good dried thyme)
• olive oil
• 250g (1/2 package) of dried pasta
• salt and pepper to taste
• 2-3 Tbs cream
  
• parmesean cheese for topping

1. Slice the fennel into thin-ish slices (about 1 inch long by 1/4 inch thick) and chop the garlic.
2. Toss the fennel together in a roasting pan with the sliced garlic, the cherry tomatoes and the thyme. Drizzle generously with olive oil (probably about 3 tablespoons worth) and toss together well.
3. Roast at 170C / 375F for about 30 minutes or until the tomatoes begin to deflate a bit and there are juices thickening in the bottom of the pan. Shake the pan once during roasting to distribute the flavors.
4. Meanwhile, boil some water to prepare the pasta.
5. When the pasta is done, toss together with all the items in the roasting pan (minus any twigs left over from the thyme). Stir in a bit of cream so that everything is gently touched with cream but not swimming in it.
6. Serve with parmesean grated on to - or not.

Home-Made Pasta

In the panoply of international cooking gadgets we received for Christmas, Mr A&N and I gained a pasta maker. We had put it on our Amazon wishlist and crossed our fingers, and were gifted it by my parents. The gift was less of a surprise than they intended: having paid extra for the gift wrapping and specifying we weren't to open it until Christmas, they then wrote on the card attached to the gift "Hope you enjoy your present - there's nothing like fresh pasta!". All gifts are gratefully received here, and we finally had a chance to turn the handle on the machine last weekend.


The ingredients for pasta are simple - flour and egg. You can fancify it to make it green (adding water from boiled spinach to the dough), red (water from boiled beetroot), or presumably another color derived from the left-overs of other boiled vegetable water. Our main intentions are to make our own ravioli but we haven't had the chance to get the ravioli-making kit to enable that. I'm a by-the-rules sort of person who wants to wait to attempt ravioli until we know it won't be a complete disaster, while Mr A&N is just e-a-g-e-r and was trying his hardest to get me to throw caution to the wind and just go for it. Sometimes it pays to be stubborn; I talked us down from that precipice and our first home-made pasta adventure involved a simple tagliatelli cut and bolognese sauce.


We didn't revolutionize the history of pasta with what we made, but we did prove to ourselves that the effort was worth it. Home-made pasta compared to dried (or even supermarket-fresh) is the difference between silk and satin; freshly-brewed and instant coffee; a 3-day weekend versus a 2-day weekend. It's subtly, and yet substantially, different. It is smoother in taste and lighter in texture without feeling you've gone as far as eating something delicate. It is the pasta of Italy, the reason that the non-descript restaurant you discovered during your last visit seemed to serve the best bowl of spaghetti you ever tasted.

The greatest mystery to me is how your average Italian grandmother can operate the thing on her own. The 3-foot long sheets of dough that had to be fed through the contraption needed to be both lightly fed through and gently grabbed at the other end, and at least at the novice stage we needed all hands on deck to prevent disaster. Frankly, I don't think I have the right Mediterranean genes to ever operate it on my own. Pasta will have to be a team effort in the A&N household the next time we want to go fresh, but it does add to the feelings of family togetherness that Italian food brings out in you anyway.

Many Bean Soup

I've been making this soup for years; it's one of the first things as an adult I figured out how to make after tasting it and falling in love with the flavors. It's hearty, it's filling, it's very easy to pull together, and it's wonderfully delicious in a very homey way.

This is an Italian-style soup, discovered when I did a term abroad in Florence during my undergraduate degree. I lived with an Italian woman who was a wonderful cook and who opened my eyes to a whole new way of cooking (and eating - I gained about 6 pounds from living with her for 3 months. Pretty impressive). This soup began making an appearance in my Italian home during the autumn, as the weather grew colder and the daylight shorter, and it's very much linked in my mind to staving off any outdoor chill with a warming bowl of goodness.

It is more than halfway to a stew, it's so thick; adding in some spinach, kale, or chard at the end of the cooking, quickly fried in a bit of garlic, would help tip the balance away from a simple soup. Even without the extra vegetables, though, it's a full meal in one bowl. The beans are nicely soft and should be caught just before they go mushy, and the minimal amount of liquid that remains after all the cooking helps tie the ingredients together and adds to the warming comforting squishiness of eating the dish.

The simple flavors of beans, beef stock, rosemary and garlic are fairly straight-forward, but generous lashings of parmesan cheese at the end really make the difference. The recipe is more of a guide than anything strict to follow; as long as you get the basics correct (the right amount of beans and stock, pasta cooked for the right time, plenty of cheese) you're onto a winner.



Many Bean Soup
Serves 4 as a main course, 6 as a starter

• 500 g of mixed dried beans (chickpeas, white beans, and roman beans/borlotti beans are usually my preferred combination)
• 1 onion, finely chopped
• 2 cloves garlic, finely sliced
• 2 litres of beef stock or 2 litres of water and 3 beef stock cubes
• 1 bay leaf
• 4 sprigs of rosemary
• salt (about 1 tsp, depending) and pepper
• 250 g ditalini pasta
• (optional: about 300-500 g of spinach or chard and 1 further clove of garlic, well chopped)
  
• plenty of parmesan

1. Soak the beans overnight / during the day to start to soften. Keep the chickpeas separate if using them.
2. When ready to cook, bring the stock / water and stock cubes to a gentle boil, adding in the onion, garlic, bay leaf and rosemary.
3. If using chickpeas, add them to the boiling stock first and cook for about 20 minutes, covered.
4. Add the other beans to the soup, and gently boil, covered, for about 1 1/2 to 2 hours.
5. The beans will be ready when they start to shed their shells. Keep in mind that the chickpeas will take the longest to cook, so make sure you check those when testing for doneness.
6. When the beans are just about done, add the salt to taste - depending on what type of stock you used, you might need 1/2 to 1 tsp of salt. Take care not to over-salt since the paremesan in the bowl will also help keep this salted.
7. (optional: quickly fry up the chopped glove of garlic and the vegetable in a bit of olive oil, turning off the heat before the leafy greens are wilted. Add the contents to the soup just before you put the pasta in, and stir through)
   
8. When the beans are ready, add in the pasta and turn off the heat after 1 further minute of gentle boiling.
9. Remove bay leaf and rosemary twigs, and spoon into bowls. Add generous amounts of parmesan into each bowl, stirring through.

An Evening of Italian Cheeses

I was invited by the lovely Sarah Maternini (a passionate foodie by day, working for San Lorenzo to spread the word about Italian food, and a fellow daring baker and blogger by night) to a tasting evening hosted by San Lorenzo and focusing on Italian cheeses and wines. Now, anyone who knows me knows that cheese holds a drug-like sway on my psyche so an evening devoted to cheeses was bound to excite. What they also might not know is that Italian food is very precious to me, since it was during my semester abroad in Italy that I really learned how to eat for the first time (and that it wasn't by using a microwave that you'd make a great dinner). Good Italian food, and authentic Italian ingredients, are my equivalent of mother's milk, and there is no quicker route to making me happy.

As part of the tasting evening, we got to try 5 cheeses (paired with different honey) and 5 wines, along with a meal using the cheese and honey as part of their ingredients. Stand-out cheeses included a strong bagoss, and a very interesting testun al barolo, a cheese matured in the casks that formerly housed barolo wine, giving the cheese a rind coated in crunchy grape bits. I was also very happy to taste a chestnut honey, which produced a wave of autumnal Tuscany nostalgia in me and which tasted of rich, sweet chestnut essence.

In the meal, I most enjoyed the beef fillet with balsamic reduction, and rocket and parmigiano on the side - the beef was very tender and perfectly cooked, and the balsamic sauce was a good balance between sharp and sweet. The dessert was a pound cake made with chestnut honey, and I ate several slices on to which I drizzled even more honey on top (since more of a good thing is a wonderful, wonderful thing).

I've looked around San Lorenzo's website since going to their tasting evening, and it is full of food bits that would tempt any fan of Italian produce. The aged parmigiano can be difficult to find outside of special cheese shops and markets (such as La Fromagerie or Borough Market) and San Lorenzo is selling it in a generous half-kilo size (a half-filo of cheese - swoon). There are also some Italian wines that can be hard to find in main-stream shops (such as a Vernaccia di San Gimignano, and a Nebbiolo which I got to taste on the evening), and of course, plenty of hams, olive oils, and balsamic vinegars. And that chestnut honey does call to me...