Orecchiette a la Funghi

Very simple and tasty meal. Again, made at a time we didn't have a lot of different ingredients around. I basically looked in the fridge and used what was there.

Ingredients:

Orecchiette--I had about 6-7 cups cooked
Quite a bit of butter (maybe 2 T?)
1 T olive oil
1 small onion, chopped
3-4 cloves of garlic, diced
Splash of white wine
1 cup frozen mushrooms*
1/4 c shredded Gruyere cheese
Small bunch of fresh basil** chopped

*Ours is a mix of chopped wild mushrooms--of course if you have fresh mushrooms, go for it!
**Actually mine was frozen, as this was again done right after a trip. I always freeze whatever fresh before I go away on a trip.

Method:
Bring a large pot of lightly salted water to a boil. When it comes to a rolling boil, you'll add the pasta. While the water is coming to a boil, start the sauce: in a saucepan, melt the butter with the oil. When heated, add the onion and saute until soft and translucent. Add the garlic, saute a minute or two more. Add the mushrooms and the wine, and about 1/2 c of the pasta cooking water. Allow to simmer on the lowest heat while waiting for the pasta to finish. Season with salt to taste. As soon as the pasta is finished, drain it, add to the saucepan. Add the basil and the Gruyere at this point as well. Toss everything together well, and serve!

Notes: I thought maybe some cream would be good, but we didn't have any. It was very nice with just the butter and the cheese, though, still tasted creamy. I think the key was A LOT of butter.

Serving Suggestion: White wine?

Orecchiette a la Vodka

Vodka really brings out the taste of tomato sauces. I especially like tomato-vodka sauces with peas. Traditionally, cream and bacon are also added. (Disclaimer: When I say "traditionally", I mean I've seen it done this way in many restaurants.) We just got back from a week-long conference and had almost no food around, especially no fresh food. This is what I made in that situation.

Ingredients:
Orecchiette pasta--I think I had about 6 or 7 cups cooked
2 small onions, diced
3-4 cloves of garlic, diced
3 canned roma tomatoes + a bit of the juice from the can
1 T tomato paste
A splash of vodka
1 t of sugar
1 c of frozen peas
About 2 T olive oil
A generous pat of butter*

*The butter is optional. Leave it out for a vegan meal. Maybe add a little more olive oil in that case.

Method:
Bring a large pot of lightly salted water to a boil. When it comes to a rolling boil, you'll add the pasta. While the water is coming to a boil, start the sauce: in a saucepan, melt the butter with the oil. When heated, add the onion and saute until soft and translucent. Add the garlic, saute a minute or two more. Add the tomatoes and juice, chopped, the tomato paste, the sugar and the vodka. Allow to simmer for a couple of minutes. The pasta's probably almost done (you don't want to over cook it). Add about 1/2 c of the pasta water to the sauce, and the peas. Let it simmer on the lowest heat while you wait for the pasta to finish. Season with salt to taste. As soon as the pasta is finished, drain it, add to the saucepan and toss well with the sauce. Serve!

Notes: The pasta water part really is important. It makes the sauce stick to the pasta. I saw it on an old-school Italian cooking show on PBS when I was about 16, and have always remembered it since then. Orecchiette is probably my favorite pasta. I've heard it's traditionally served with broccoli, but I like it with anything. My BF thought it wasn't the best for this dish, he thinks that orecchiette needs a creamier sauce. I think it would go nicely with many different types of pasta, for some reason I think that short ones would be better than long ones (linguine, spaghetti...).

Serving Suggestion: Maybe garnish with a little parsley? I thought it was a very tasty dinner. Since we visited Italy I've been inspired to try and do more interesting things with pasta lately.

Pelmeni

Pelmeni are basically Russian tortellini. But different. Does that make sense? The shape is essentially the same, and they are basically pasta, but the filling is different and they are served differently.

The standard pelmeni filling is ground meat (it can be a mix of beef, pork, lamb, my BF's mom even puts ground chicken in sometimes), onion, salt and pepper. I've never seen a different filling, and my BF looked at me like I was from another planet when I innocently asked, "Does anyone ever make pelmeni with minced fish inside?"

We made a bunch of them last night, it was a really satisfying meal.

Pelmeni

Ingredients:

2.5 glasses* of flour
1 egg
1/2 teaspoon salt
water as needed (approximately 1/2 a glass)

1/4 medium onion
325 g ground meat (I used beef, 20% fat)
salt and pepper

*A "glass" is a measurement used in many Russian recipes. I believe it comes from the time when most household items were very standardized; everyone had glasses of pretty much the same size and design. The glass I used was a cup in volume, and it's very close to the size of the magic glass referred to in Russian recipes.

Method:

First prepare the dough. Place the flour and salt in a bowl, or if you're very awesome (which I'm not), on a clean dry surface, like a big wooden cutting board. Make a well in the center and add the egg. Start to mix, and add the water slowly, mixing as you go. You need to add enough such that you have a smooth, soft dough, but not too much or it will be sticky. If it gets a little too sticky, you can add extra flour, a little bit at a time. Knead the dough for a bit so it's supple and smooth.

Now prepare the filling. Mix the ground meat with chopped onion, add plenty of salt and pepper.

Roll out the dough very thinly on a floured large surface. Cut it into squares that are about 1.5" on each side. You can just use a "grid" method to do this, it's fast and efficient: make lines 1.5" apart going one direction, and then make them again in the direction 90 degrees away. Any pieces that are too small can be mixed together and re-rolled out.

Place a thimbleful of filling (about a teaspoon) on each square in the center. Now comes the tricky part, if you haven't done it before; the folding.

A___________B
|...................|
|....*******....|
|....********...|
|....*******....|
C____________D

Above is my incredibly nerdy rendition of an unfolded pelmen. To fold one, first make a triangular pocket, bringing point D to point A, and pinching well to seal sides A/DB and A/DC.

A/D
/.......\
/..........\
/.............\
C__________B

Once you have a triangular pocket (poorly rendered above), bring points C and B together. You now have a finished pelmen. Repeat for the probably close to 100 squares you have!

This site has non-keyboard-generated pictures of the finished product, and of the preparation steps. They cut the dough into circles, which is also an option.

To cook them, bring lightly salted water or broth to a boil, and place them in the boiling water. Once they float, you can check the filling of one to see if it's ready. But I just let them all cook for a couple more minutes after they start to float, and then serve them.

Notes and Serving Suggestion: It's tedious. That's why this is usually a family activity, and I strongly encourage you to enlist help where you can. You can serve them in the water/broth they were cooked in, kind of as a soup. Otherwise, they can be eaten with butter, sour cream, vinegar, soy sauce, chopped greens on top, ketchup, whatever you want! My favorite is to put sour cream and chopped dill and parsely on them, eat them with the broth, or to eat them with soy sauce and apple cider vinegar.

Cheap but Good: Explore your pantry, freezer and fridge

I don't know about you, but I somehow always end up with half used quantities of food in my freezer and fridge. Usually this happens when I buy a food item, planning to use it to make a certain dish, and I don't end up using all of it. It also happens that sometimes I stock my pantry too well, and forget just what canned or dried foods I have in there. I got to thinking about this, and came to the conclusion that I would probably save a lot of money if I tried more often to cook from what I already have in my kitchen. To test how well this could work out, I examined my pantry, freezer and fridge with the goal of creating something delicious without making a trip to the store for anything.

Here's what happened:

Today I had a few mushrooms and 200 g of ground beef left from pirozhki making. I definitely wanted to use the beef, because there wasn't room in the (tiny French) freezer to freeze it. And I'm always a fan of mushrooms, so I decided to use those too. Besides, if I didn't they'd get mushy soon. So I put the beef and the mushrooms on my kitchen table. Looked around some more, but it seemed that everything else would keep pretty well (random cheese, cabbage, pickles) or was already assigned to be eaten for lunch (lettuce, green onions). Ok, moving on to the freezer.

There I found a bag of chopped frozen spinach left from making palaak paneer. It had started out as a 1 kilo bag and there was only 250 g left or so. The lump of spinach was taking up precious freezer space, especially due to the awkward shape. I put it on the table to use. Things were interesting in the freezer. That's because my BF is a total carnivore and buys random meat when there's a good deal. Or when he thinks it just looks tasty. Which brings me to the 500 g of Italian sausage that was sitting in there. I took it out, placed it on the table, and examined my ingredients.

Beef, sausage, mushrooms, spinach. I thought I'd go with something Italian due to the sausage, which I planned on taking out of it's casing and mixing with the beef. Ok, if we're going Italian, let's look in the pantry and see what's available in the way of pasta.

The pantry expedition was the deciding factor in what I'd make. There I spotted, shoved towards the back, a box of never-opened no-pre-cooking-needed lasagna noodles. Interesting. I didn't remember buying them. I asked BF, "Did you buy these?" It turns out he did ... before we even started dating (we're going on two years). :-D But I checked the expiration date, and it was fine. Besides, they'd never been opened.

Fine, it looked like I was gonna make lasagna. Beef, sausage, mushrooms, spinach, noodles. Well, can't really have a lasagna without cheese (or tofu), so I went back to the fridge to see what was available. There was an unopened tub of ricotta. Aw, I had wanted to eat that with canned peaches (I love ricotta with fruit)! But, now I was kind of set on lasagna, so I put it on the table too. But what about mozzarella to go on top? We didn't have any. But I did spot nearly 250 g of chaource cheese. I thought to myself, "If they can put reblachon on pizza, I can use that to top a lasagna." I also grabbed an egg to mix with the ricotta, 2 cloves of garlic and got a 800 g can of peeled Roma tomatoes from the pantry (we always have a few cans of those around).

Lasagna

Ingredients:

500 g Italian sausage, removed from casing
200 g ground beef
1 800 g can peeled Roma tomatoes
2 cloves of garlic, peeled and chopped
250 g frozen chopped spinach
3 medium white mushrooms, chopped
1 egg
1 250 g tub of ricotta cheese
20 no-cooking-needed lasagna noodles
Salt to taste
1 T dried parsley
1 T dried oregano
1 T dried basil
About 250 g chaource cheese

Method:

Mix the beef and the sausage. Brown, then mix in the tomatoes (chopped), with their juice. Reserve a bit of the juice (about 1/2 cup). Salt the mixture to taste. In a saucepan, warm the spinach and the mushrooms until the spinach is completely thawed. Cool slightly, and mix with ricotta cheese and chopped garlic. Salt to taste, then mix with beaten egg. Spread the bottom of a large baking dish with the reserved tomato juice. Place a layer of 4 noodles over this. Cover noodles with 1/3 meat mixture. Layer 4 noodles again. Cover noodles with 1/2 spinach mixture. Repeat: noodles, meat, noodles, spinach, noodles, meat. Sprinkle top meat layer with the dried herbs. Cut chaource into 8 even wedges; reserve for later. Place lasagna into oven preheated to 350 degrees F (gas mark 6 in France). Bake for 20 minutes, then remove and top with chaource wedges arranged in a 2x4 matrix. Put lasagna back into oven and bake for another 15 minutes. Remove and allow to cool slightly before slicing.

Notes: Placing sauce/juice before the first layer of noodles is important if you don't want the lasagna to stick. When you remove it from the oven, there will be a lot of liquid around the lasagna. If you let it rest, that won't be a problem. This will form sort of a sauce (just the right amount). For vegetarian lasagna, make a marinara sauce and cut zucchini or eggplant into slices. Instead of the meat layer, put a little sauce, then arrange the veg slices, then top with some more sauce.

Serving Suggestion: Technically I'm going to say that this makes 8 servings, although they are large servings. I think that 1/16 of the lasagna with a nice green salad would be enough for me on most days!

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UPDATE: I just did a calorie calculation for this dish, and it is NOT a light-weight. One eighth of it has 575 calories. Yikes!
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Cheap but Good: Getting Experimental with Pasta Sauces

Even though it definitely falls under the category of "cheap but good," I don't cook a lot of pasta, and not a lot of pasta sauce either. Not because I can't whip up something tasty, but because it's my boyfriend's "job." We have this sort of unspoken understanding that there are certain things that he cooks. Here's the list: fried eggs, mashed potatoes, pasta and associated sauces, pork. There are things that are "mine", too: soups, anything else done with eggs, beef, Indian food. Often I branch out and try to cook things that aren't on my list, but he knows what he is good at and sticks to it. I can honestly say that he does everything on his list much, much better than I do, even though I have more cooking experience.

Part of why his pasta sauces end up better than mine comes from his willingness to throw in everything but the kitchen sink. I tend to take a more cautious approach, selecting a few ingredients that I know will go well together. My result is always good, but strangely enough his is too. I keep waiting for one of his random sauces to fail and it hasn't happened yet.

His approach to making pasta sauce leads to a highly economical and tasty dinner, because what he does is take various odds and ends from the fridge--that may not have otherwise been used--and incorporates them into our meal. A few artichoke hearts left in a jar, likewise for some lonely green olives, the last splash of wine from the bottle on the table, the last tablespoon of cream in the tub, mixed with parsley that's just starting to wilt and that bacon that'll go bad if we don't use it the next couple of days. He usually throws in a dash of a couple spices too; sometimes unusual things, like cumin or coriander.

All these odds and ends combined with a can of diced tomatoes (or when we have them, a chopped fresh one) make a huge panful of sauce that we eat with whatever dried pasta we have on hand. All it needs is a tiny sprinkling of grated parmesan cheese to be perfect.