I use my site for posting serious articles about mathematics. I’ll use this to put up general musings on the subject, sketch notes of things, etc. I’m going to start with using it to put up some articles based on me trying to understand Dales and Woodin’s “Super-Real Fields” and see where it goes from there.
David
I’m notorious for not wanting to cook pasta; It feels like cheating to me. I suspect this is a hangup from my student days and not wanting to conform to the stereotype. So I’m rather glad to try new pasta recipes which are weird enough for me to consider actually using.
This is loosely based on a recipe by Jamie Oliver from his new Italy book (Rather, the free extracts from it that were being given out in the Guardian). There are two main reasons it’s only loosely based on the original recipe: Firstly, the original makes heavy use of parmesan and I don’t do dairy products. Secondly, I lost the recipe halfway through cooking.
What I used:
A handful of linguini
3 eggs
Lots of olive oil
About 1 tbsp flour
Dried chilli
Dried oregano
Dried thyme
Salt
Some sun dried tomatoes which I had previously soaked and stored in a mixture of olive oil, sunflower oil and white wine vinegar.
What I did:
I cooked the linguini just short of the instructions on the packet. While this was happening I chopped up the sun dried tomatoes and then added everything else to a mixer bowl and turned on the mixer (what can I say, I’m lazy). Everything else did include quite a lot of olive oil (I was stupid and forgot that if you add flour to liquid then it goes lumpy, so I used the olive oil and some heavy duty mixing to break up the lumps and smooth it out). Once the pasta was cooked I added that to the mixer as well and mixed it for a bit longer. I then cut it up slightly with a knife (just breaking some of the pieces in half really).
I then heated more olive oil in a pan and added about a handful of the mixture to it and fried it until it was reasonably cooked, turning it over several times as it cooked. The first two didn’t really get enough of the batter, so they ended up a bit crappy. The second two did and were fairly nice.
Conclusion:
I’d say this was a qualified success. The batter didn’t properly coat the linguini, which is why the first two didn’t work very well. It could possibly use a bit less liquid and a bit more flour next time. Jamie Oliver suggests only using the yolk from the third egg. That sounded like far too much work to me, so I didn’t bother. In future I probably still won’t bother, but it might be worth trying. Further, it was a bit too oily. This was my own silly fault for using so much olive oil in the batter – it didn’t really need that much liquid, and a bit of water would work to substitute for most of it.
It might be worth breaking the linguini in half before cooking: The length of the noodles made it difficult to get decent sized quantities out of the bowl and into the frying pan. Other things I might try adding to the mix include chopped olives and fried onions. There are few savoury recipes that can’t be made better with onions. If you do eat dairy and want to try this recipe, I’d probably recommend adding up to a handful of parmesan to the batter. I suspect it would improve it a lot.
These problems aside, it was delicious, though it did need salt and pepper added. The chilli gave it a nice bite, while the herbs combined well with the flavours of the tomatoes, egg and pasta. I probably wouldn’t make this as a regular meal, but it’s definitely a nice snack food.
You know when you go to see a movie which claims “Based on a novel by…” and find it has only vague similarities in common with the book? This recipe turned out sortof like that. It is based on a recipe entitled “Snake squash stuffed with spicy potatoes in a tomato-herb sauce” in “Classic Indian Vegetarian Cooking” by Julie Sahni (a book which I highly recommend). Due to a combination of laziness and available ingredients, I’ve significantly changed the recipe. Here’s an account of my version:
First of all, hollowing out a squash sounded like an awful lot of work, so I thought I’d use a pumpkin instead. (My mother grows large quantities of squash and pumpkins and I’m living with my parents for the next few months, so I’ll probably be doing a lot of pumpkin and squash experiments). Having done that I decided to add some leftover squash from the other day to the mix, as the recipe called for using the meat of the hollowed out squash in the filling. Then I changed some other things as well, just ’cause I could. This is how it went.
What I used:
One medium small pumpkin.
About 20 smallish potatoes.
Two large red onions.
Two large tomatoes.
About a third of a smallish sweet squash (I’ll try to find out the type later).
Sunflower oil
One fresh chilli
Dried powdered chilli
Mustard seeds
Cumin seeds
Garam Masala
Coarse Salt
Brown Sugar
Balsamic Vinegar
Molasses
What I did:
I took the pumpkin, cut a hole in the top and scooped out the insides like I was making a Jack o’ lantern. Make sure you cut a large enough hole – I didn’t, and this was irritating. While this was happening I put the potatoes on to boil, cooking them until they were just slightly undercooked.
Note: I don’t skin potatoes. I believe it to be a cruel and evil thing to do to an innocent vegetable. Also it’s boring.
This done I started making the Massala, frying the onion (reasonably finely chopped) with a little cumin, a lot of mustard seeds about one and a half tsp of salt and a tbsp of sugar. After 5-10 minutes frying I added the powdered spices. Another 5 minutes later I added the squash and chilli, continued frying for another 5 minutes and added the potatoes. Midway through this I realised the pan I had was way too small and transferred to a bigger one. Oops.
After about 5 minutes frying the potatoes I chopped up the tomatoes and added them to the mix. Another five minutes and I added a little boiling water to prevent things from burning, a dash of balsamic vinegar and about a tablespoon of molasses. I mixed it all up, let it cook for another minute and then transferred it to the pumpkin, covering it with the ‘lid’ of the pumpkin.
Now to prepare the pumpkin for roasting. I coated it with oil, wrapped it in tin foil and stuck it on a baking tray. I then put it in the oven at a high temperature for about an hour and a half. The aga had lost a lot of heat though, so in a normal oven an hour would probably suffice.
To serve I openend up the foil, cut away at the top a bit to get better access to the insides (if you cut a big enough hole in the first place you won’t need to do this) and scraped at the insides of the pumpkin to mix them with the filling.
I served this with pita bread and Dal.
Conclusion:
Wow. This was great. I highly recommend it. It was a lovely combination of sweet and spicy, and the pumpkin gave off a lot of juice which made the filling (which was already moist) into a really nice stew.
I’m not sure if the foil was entirely neccesary. The pumpkin gave off an awful lot of juice, and seemed to be more steamed than roasted. This produced a nice effect, but most of the moisture would probably still be there if I hadn’t done it – the pumpkin was literally swimming in it at the end – and the pumpkin flesh would have acquired a nice roast flavour. It’s something worth bearing in mind for future versions. Also, the potatoes could have used being cooked a little more before hand. This may have been a product of the oven losing heat.
Other things to try in future: Some sort of bean, both for flavour and for protein, would be a nice addition to the filling. Also I think sultanas would go well in it. It might need a bit more salt, but then I always think recipes could use more salt (and rarely add more salt to them because I know I’ll oversalt them when eating anyway).
Random note: Every single vegetable in this dish was grown by us. Not that I can take a lot of credit for this myself, but it was still nice.
Hi there.
So, I make another excursion into the blogging world. Hopefully this will go a little better than my last one, which failed because it was too general (and has now been deleted).
As per the description, I’ll be putting up accounts of new cooking ideas I’ve been playing with. This won’t have any of my tried and tested recipes (those will be on my site if anywhere), just the new ones I’m playing around with.
I should have the first few recipes up later tonight after I’ve cooked today’s dinner (which will itself be one of the first entries on here – an Indian roast squash with spicy potato filling).
David