pasta!

Ciao S., (read "esse", in Italian)

today N. and I made fresh pasta.
Here's a small tutorial:





per person, take 100g flour and 1 egg, plus a pinch of salt. We decided to take 400g of flour; to dry half of it.






knead! a lot! it might help to seperate the dough into smaller portions to get it all smooth. put the dough in the fridge for a while.

Then comes the magic machine:
(you can roll it by hand, my grandma used to do so up to the age of 88, but it is hard work). You gradually go from the broadest to the thinnest "lane"- position. (oh yes, my English is failing me. nevermind.)







it's much easier and nicer to prepare fresh pasta with two!
then cut the pasta as you wish. We went for a very simple form, stracchi. Which are basically just random pieces (rags, actually, but that doesn't sound too nice).




According to Jamie Oliver, well-dried pasta can be stored up to two months in an airtight container. If you made spaghetti or tagliatelle, wou will want to hang them on a stick or so to dry them. We simply put our stracchi on a clean tea towel, together with lots of flour- they like to stick together.

The other half we prepared after letting them dry for an hour or so. I simply baked aubergine cubes in olive oil, added some pepper and salt. Make a quick tomato sauce with garlic and onion, serve with some fresh basil in parmiggiano. and then enjoy :)




If you have never tried to make pasta yourself, please do so. This is the very simplest of hundreds of pasta recipies, yet it is so nice and entirely different to dried pasta from the store!

eccola, pasta fatta in mano.

tanti baci,

M.

random > none

Dear S.,

today I had to choose between a rather random/weird post vs no post. random it is!


First-ever home made Tortellini, filled with champignons and Ravioli filled with ricotta and spinach. (yet again: oh how I wish I finally knew how to take good pictures! also: the Tortellini should have looked nicer, to begin with. oh well.)



Lovely spring salad: chicoree (witloof), orange filets, chopped almonds, strawberries, a simple vinegrette of the fresh excess orange juice and white wine vinegar.


Ideal sunday study.






2 new fabrics from Ikea! I love them. Planning a tote bag. But that's the problem these days, I don't get much further than the planning. Too much work for Uni, I'm getting a little stressed with my Ba-Paper. Which is good in a way, because now I'm really into it.

Love!

M.

truffels

heyhey,

i promised to load up some craft pics.
so here are some things i made.
a little owl, some cussion covers and loats of pralines( truffels)
I don't have an oven yet so express my baking needs in chocolate.
i also smuggeld a pic of my new home in... with the advent calendar my mum made for me. it's nice to have a ittle present every morning to get me out of bed.








The easyest truffel recipe.

300 g dark chocolate
150ml cream
30 g butter

so just heat up the cream, mixe the chocolate bits in , than add the butter. let it cool in the fridge for some hours. than take scoops with a dinner spoon and rool them to balls in your cold hands. to make it look nicer role them in sugarpearls, cocoa-powder or grounded coco nut. you also can dip them into melted chocolate.

if you want to spice it up you can use some cinamon, ginger, tea, cardamom, nutmeg, vanilla... in it, just as you like it.

the thing is that the amount of cream depends on the chocolate. as more grease the chocolate contains the less cream and butter you need to use. so 300 g of white chocolate does with aproximately 80ml cream and no butter.

kisses
s

chestnut cocooning

Dear S.,

it's chestnut season! Last sunday we went into a nice park in Borgerhout and stumbled over hundreds of gorgeous shimmering brown chestnuts.
I know that you love them so much :)
As a child, I used to go outside and collect them with my mum and friends to construct little wood figures, with beechnuts (Bucheckern) and acorns (Eicheln). We rarely have the tame sort of chestnuts in woods with us at home, so I do not know the tradition of cooking with them myself, but I do remember them from christmas markets. So, it was a very first time for me to prepare chestnuts. I loved them! We simply roasted them in a pan for about 20 mins. mmmh, such cosy food!
But first, some forest impressions:



(nuts in chest? is that why they are called like this?)



leavesnutschestsleavesnuts!




be-au-ti-ful. When I saw these empty chestnut covers, a rather special german word came to my mind: sich einigeln. The term comes from the thing a hedgehog (Igel) does when it is scared or wants to sleep, it rolls up into a tight ball with all its spines (Stachel) pointing outwards. You use sich einigeln to say that someone closes oneself off from a conrontation/the outside world. Funnily enough it is translated with "to cocoon", which has a rather positive connotation for many people. For me, sich einigeln certainly has a positive connotation as well: what a good idea to protect yourself against autumn/winterness by rolling up like a hedgehog or sit as comfortably as a chestnut in its shell. But don't forget to open the door for friends and all that.
So, that was a lot of bla. now you deserve another picture ;)




This huge heart with the universal love message is carved into a tree in the park.
And here comes the eating part:




I also made chestnut-rum-chocolate pralines, here they are:




They were a lot of work (cook chestnuts, open them, peel them, mash them, rum/cacao/sugar them, form into little balls, glace with chocolate, chill.), and for my personal taste they are too chestnutty.

Oh well, I'll try to work for uni now. or read the paper. or knit.
This week I had an interesting talk with an old friend of mine about "Autumness". Every year when it strucks me, I try to fight it off and have the tendency to get all upset about it. Instead, my friend suggested, it is a better idea to just accept it. Embrace the fact that I get a little slower in autumn, that I need more time for cocooning, mich einigeln, and so on. This sounds good. I'll try. Not to be perfect but to just be autumn me.

Much love,

M.