Life List Update: Make Fresh Pasta

I’m starting the year on the right foot. I’ve already watched a couple of movies to start my annual tally, as well as tried a few new recipes and it’s only the first week of January! 🙂

I have always had “make fresh pasta” on my life list. Ever since our trip to Italy two years ago, and our return trip last year (love Italia!!!), it’s bumped up on the priorities.

I figured since I don’t own a pasta machine or a stand mixer with pasta attachment, the easiest noodle to make would be ravioli. So I scoured cookbooks and online recipes until I found a recipe that would suit a first timer and had a lot of good reviews.

I ended up following the dough from here, and tweaked the pesto sauce to accommodate what I had on hand and reduce the recipe to 2 servings for my husband and I.

I admit to being a bit nervous. Homemade pasta just seemed so intimidating. But I persevered through my little well of flour and egg mixture, then through the rolling (and rolling and rolling) trying to get the dough as thin as possible. Then adding the filling in little piles on the first sheet of dough, brush with egg wash, cover with second sheet and I used a ravioli cutter but you could easily use a knife or a pizza cutter. Boiled them, then baked them for 4 mins to turn brown.

The filling was delicious with four cheeses: mozzarella, provolone, cream cheese and ricotta. For the sauce, I heated olive oil, added a fresh crushed garlic clove (from my garden last year), a 1/4 cup of my Genovese basil pesto that I froze last summer (and thawed overnight), about a half cup of heavy cream and 1/4 cup of parmesan. It turned out great (albeit the color was off because I didn’t blanch my basil when I prepared the pesto last summer..serves me right). 🙂

I was relieved it all turned out and the little pillows were delicious. Wonder what I’ll make next!

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Roast Loin of Pork with Fennel

I made this for supper last night and the house smelled so good while it was roasting. I really like fennel when it’s been roasted – the anise flavour mellows.  Honestly, I love anything that’s been roasted…it’s so darn good. This recipe has fennel, potatoes, carrots and onions. The pork is slathered in Dijon, thyme leaves, garlic and salt & pepper then popped into the oven with the veggies.

This recipe can be found here from the Barefoot Contessa Parties cookbook.

Delicious and super easy – the hard part is waiting for it to cook and waiting for the meat to rest. Torture! 🙂

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Easy Provençal Lamb

I made this for dinner – it being close to Easter and all. 🙂

It turned out quite good, the veggies were very flavourful and the honey added a caramelization to both the lamb and the veggies. Tasty!

Before:

I almost didn’t get an AFTER shot since we had already started digging in! Forgive the messy plate. 🙂

The recipe is from the Barefoot Contessa “How Easy is That” cookbook and can be found here.

Bon appetit peeps!

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Old-Fashioned Apple Crisp

I made this today and we had some for dessert after lunch with coffee. Delicious. The whole house smelled like apples and cinnamon while it was baking. 🙂

The Barefoot Contessa recipe is here.

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Potato Basil Frittata

I needed to use the eggs I had in the fridge and looked for a recipe that would need a lot of them and found this. I made this for lunch today and it was delicious! The potatoes and basil were awesome and the Gruyère cheese gave it some zing. With a simple side salad lightly drizzled with lemon infused olive oil and some pepper, it was a perfect light lunch.

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Cooking Update!

Although I haven’t posted much about my cooking updates, I have still been working my way through the Barefoot Contessa recipes and with this morning’s “Sunday Morning Oatmeal”, I’m now at 243 recipes completed out of 607. That’s 40% done! Pretty awesome. Ina also has a new cookbook coming out in October so I’m looking forward to that as well, just in time for my birthday.

My goal this year is to cook 40 recipes. The recipes I’ve completed so far in 2014 are found on my Cooking Goals 2014 page but I’ve listed them below as of this morning:

1. Butternut squash and apple soup (Jan 1)

2. Warm mushroom salad (Jan 4)

3. Perfect roast chicken (Jan 5)

4. French string bean salad (Jan 6)

5. Viennese Iced Coffee (Jan 10)

6. Spinach pie (Jan 11)

7. Jeffrey’s roast chicken (Jan 11)

8. Lemon yogurt cake (Jan 19)

9. Lasagna with turkey sausage (Jan 19)

10. Curried couscous (Jan 22)

11. Virginia Baked Ham (Jan 26)

12. Sautéed carrots (Jan 26)

13. Sunday Morning Oatmeal (Mar 2)

I’m also planning on making 2 more this weekend for lunch (Tagliarelle with White Truffle Butter) and dinner (Chicken Piccata).

We made a pit stop at the liquor store to replenish our wine fridge. This time we went European and picked up wines from Spain, France and Italy. Life is good. 🙂

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Balsamic Roasted Beet Salad

I made this for lunch today – it’s from the Barefoot Contessa Foolproof cookbook. We’ve been eating a lot of not-so-healthy stuff over the holidays and I was in need of a good cleansing dish. I had organic lettuce and beets as well as leftover goat cheese in the fridge so chose this recipe. I chose to roast the beets (tossed in some of the dressing) which allowed them to caramelize a bit. The flavours of this salad worked really great together – I’ll definitely make this again.

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Roasted Asparagus with Prosciutto

The pic isn’t the best but I promise the dish was tasty. 🙂 This is from the Barefoot Contessa Foolproof cookbook. Would you believe it was the first time I made fried eggs? Also the first time I made a Hollandaise sauce. All turned out great!  This was a light et surprisingly filling meal. Definitely will make again.

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Foolproof and Produce Update

Ever since I got Ina’s latest cookbook, I’ve been cooking but being very lax about posting! I know, I know. But I swear, I *am* keeping track of all the recipes I’ve been making. I’ve listed them at the very bottom of my Cooking page. 🙂

Here’s the count to date along with some notes:

FOOLPROOF COOKBOOK – completed 12 of 88

Winter Minestrone & Garlic Bruschetta – very nice cold weather soup

Sicilian Grilled Swordfish – absolutely awesome

Easy Tomato Soup with Grilled Cheese Croutons – another great soup for winter

Mashed Sweet Potatoes – tasty and a nice option for a holiday side

Tuscan Mashed Chickpeas – just so-so for me

Israeli Couscous & Tuna Salad – great flavours

Chicken with Wild Mushrooms – to DIE for; the gravy alone is heaven on a plate

Easy Tzatziki with Feta – simple, quick and very tasty

Salmon & Melting Cherry Tomatoes – very tasty for salmon lovers

Zucchini Vichyssoise – Yummy!

Straw & Hay with Gorgonzola – Rich and tasty, decadent

Roasted Crispy Kale – What a cool side dish, reminded me of crispy spinach often found in asian restaurants

Overall, if I count all of Ina’s cookbooks, I’ve completed 215 of 695 recipes.

It’s been fun looking for recipes to use up the produce we’ve been receiving as part of our weekly delivery from Mama Earth Organics. That’s been really awesome – we’re now in week 4. We’ve been able to try some new vegetables (to us) such as red chard and kale. Everything has been of great quality so far and I look forward to receiving our new basket every week! Since I try hard to use up all the fruits and veggies from the basket, we’re eating lots of healthy food these days. And a nice side effect is that we’ve lost a few pounds – go figure!

There’s been tons of variety so far. In the past 4 weeks, we’ve received different apples, oranges, bananas, grapefruit, avocado, kale, red chard, lettuce, carrots, potatoes, beets, button and shiitake mushrooms, onion, leeks, garlic, broccoli, zucchini, baby bok choy, yams, and more! We’re super pleased of having made the switch – highly recommend to anyone.

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Straw and Hay with Gorgonzola

This is another recipe from the new Barefoot Contessa cookbook Foolproof.

This was a truly decadent lunch – tagliatelle in an amazing sauce made of cream (of course), gorgonzola dolce, prosciutto, peas, garlic, onions, basil and parmesan. How can this not be amazing?! Delicious.

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