Fresh garden vegetable pasta

I've been watching green tomatoes grow all summer and now I'm finally getting a regular supply of tasty, red, ripe ones (it's almost September!), although I should be very grateful really, because these tomatoes grew without me realising when I used some of last year's tomato growbag to top up the pots on my patio. So instead of growing flowers, up came tomatoes! I didn't even realise they weren't flowers until they were quite big and had that tomato smell. Shame about the flowers. I also have some late runner beans, which my Granny gave me as little plants. They're enjoying the wet weather and beginning to grow some delicious beans. The rest of the vegetable patch contains some gladioli, which were going to be cut flowers but only one made it into the house, a cabbage from last year that survived the caterpillar attack and a forgotten pepper plant that might grow a pepper, one day. You can probably tell, I'm not that great at maintaining my veg patch, which makes me all the more grateful for this lovely pasta dish, the ingredients for which grew all by themselves!

Fresh garden vegetable pasta
Serves 2

100g spiralini (or your pasta of choice)
8-10 fresh cherry tomatoes
4 runner beans
A handful of capers, rinsed
1 tablespoon olive oil
1/2 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
A handful of marjoram (or oregano - I just happen to grow marjoram in my garden)

Cook the pasta according to the directions on the packaging. Chop the runner beans into short lengths, about 2 cm each and add to the pan with the pasta towards the end of cooking. Chop the tomatoes into quarters and the capers into smaller pieces (I find this distributes their salty flavour, especially the bigger varieties). When the pasta is cooked, drain most of the cooking water, but leave a few tablespoons of water behind in the pan. Add the tomatoes, capers, olive oil and balsamic vinegar and toss to combine. Sprinkle the marjoram on top to serve.

Home-made croissants

I embarked on an adventure this weekend and attempted to make croissants from scratch. I had lots of fun making the pastry - definitely the thing to do on a cold rainy weekend. Except it was a hot, sunny weekend so I missed out on the good weather! I didn't mind - what could be more fun than going back to the kitchen every few hours to do something more to progress the pastry?

I found that the proving step is very important (otherwise they're heavy and doughy, much like bread if you don't prove it), and it's important to keep it as cold as possible, as with other pastries.

I inadvertently made mini croissants because I hadn't quite worked out how long the triangles have to be to make ones of normal size. However, they were very cute and my colleagues certainly enjoyed sampling them!

I used the instructions from here. Annoyingly, the ingredients are on the first page and the instructions on the other pages, so had to keep going back to refer to the ingredients. Apart from that, I don't think I can improve upon the recipe, so I'll just leave you with a couple of photos.

Marrow and spinach lasagne

A friend of ours came round last week for a church meeting and she arrived holding a marrow! Apparently something had made it difficult for her and her husband to get to their allotment, so the courgettes they were looking forward to, had turned into marrows. I also had the lasagne sheets in the freezer left over from my pasta-making day, so I made it into a delicious lasagne. I used cottage cheese for this, which did look a bit ugly in the pan (a very lumpy cheese sauce!) but tasted good and wasn't noticeable once it's assembled. You could use ricotta, of course, but I couldn't find it in my little local supermarket. Low-fat soft cheese would also work well. This would be a good vegetarian dish if you omit the bacon.

Marrow and spinach lasagne
Serves 2–3

For the green part -
500g spinach
1/4 of a marrow, peeled and deseeded then grated (I used the trusty food processor for this)
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
2 tablespoons toasted pine nuts

For the white "sauce" part -
2 cloves garlic
1 small red onion
3 rashers smoked bacon, chopped
1 small tub of cottage cheese
4 tablespoons of vegetable stock (or a generous sprinkle of Boullion and water - you can mix it in the pan, which saves washing up!)
1 teaspoon English mustard


fresh lasagne sheets (I used mine straight from the freezer)

Preheat the oven to 200 degrees C.

Finely chop the red onion and soften in a pan with some oil. Add the garlic and after about 5–8 minutes, add bacon and fry until cooked through.

Grate the marrow and defrost (if using frozen spinach) the spinach. If using fresh spinach, roughly chop it. Use half the spinach to form a layer on the bottom of the dish, then add half the marrow on top. Spinkle half of the nutmeg and half of the pine nuts on top.

Add the cottage cheese to the bacon and onion mixture, then add the stock and mustard and taste for seasoning (It was pretty salty by this point due to the bacon and stock, which seasoned the whole dish nicely).

Layer lasagne sheets on top of the marrow, then add half of the sauce and more lasagne sheets. Add the marrow again with the rest of the nutmeg and pine nuts, with another layer of lasagne and sauce, followed by the final layer of lasagne. Top it off with the rest of the spinach and the parmesan.

Place in the hot oven for 20 minutes. I have a grill in my oven so I switched it to grill at the end to get the top crispy.

Enjoy with a fresh salad!

Pasta!

Today I decided to try out my MagiMix and new pasta machine so I made a batch of standard egg pasta. I used the recipe below.

Fresh egg pasta

300g "00" flour (or flour suitable for pasta making)
3 whole eggs

Whizz the flour in the food processor to work some air into it. Beat the eggs together and add about two-thirds of the mixture. Continue adding egg until you have a sticky breadcrumb texture. It may take more egg, or it may be less – it depends on the moisture in the atmosphere and in the flour. Mould the crumbs into a ball of dough and knead in your hands until it is all consistent and smooth. Wrap in clingfilm and leave for about 30 minutes. This helps the gluten to develop so that the dough is much more stretchy when you come to run it through the pasta machine. When it is ready, divide the dough into four and work with one quarter. Wrap the other pieces back in the clingfilm as you don't want it to dry out.

Run the pasta though the machine on progressively smaller settings to stretch it thin. I also tested out some other attachments which cut the pasta into taglietelli or linguini. It's supposed to be thin enough to read a newspaper through (or as the Italians say, thin enough to read a love letter through!).

I also made ravioli with a cheese and rosemary filling:

To store the pasta, toss it in bags with semolina (to keep the strands separate) and freeze for up to one month.

Leith's buttermilk bread

Days two and three of the Leith's cookery course were so much fun! We made sweet sable biscuits (using the magimix - I am now the proud owner of a MagiMix 4200!), buttermilk bread, beetroot and goats cheese tart, and most excitingly, we learnt how to fillet fish! I filleted a mackerel rather well, if I may say so myself. The last time I saw a mackerel was on the Parasites and Vectors module of my biology degree where we had to pick little (still live) worms out of the fish's gills and body cavity. It put me off mackerel for years. This time though, I didn't go looking for those, I just set about getting the lovely flesh off the bones. Sadly no pictures of that, but I do have the recipe for wonderfully sweet buttermilk bread, which was a lot of fun to make.

Buttermilk bread

15g fresh yeast
100ml milk, scalded (sometimes the proteins in the milk can react with the yeast so it is best to "scald" the milk - heat it until a skin forms but do not boil it)
1 teaspoon caster sugar
450g strong plain flour
2tsp salt
30g butter
190ml buttermilk
1 egg, lightly beaten
beaten egg to glaze

Dissolve yeast with a little milk and sugar in a small bowl. Sift the flour with the salt, then add the butter to the scalded milk. Stir the buttermilk into the scalded milk, add the yeast mixture and pour about two-thirds of the liquid into the dry ingredients. Mix vigorously and continue to add liquid until you have a sticky dough.

Lightly flour a worktop and turn the dough out onto it. Careful not too add too much flour or it drys out the dough. Keep your hands clean and free from bits of dough as you knead. Knead the dough for about 10 minutes until it is smooth and elastic. Put the dough back in the bowl and cover with a piece of lightly greased clingfilm. Leave to rest in a warm place until it has doubled in size. If you like, you can leave it in the fridge overnight (it just slows down the rising action of the yeast).

When the dough has risen, knock it down and knead for a minute or two. Grease a 1kg loaf tin and shape the dough into an oblong and place in the loaf tin. Cover and leave to prove until it has nearly doubled. Brush the top with beaten egg, or dust with flour.

Bake the loaf for 30 minutes or until it is golden and firm.

Turn the loaf onto a wire rack to cool. It should sound hollow when tapped. If it doesn't, turn it over and put it back in the oven for another 5 minutes.

We all sat down to a delicious three-course lunch on the third day, consisting of bruschetta canapes (above) crab soup (with buttermilk bread), duck breast (where we learnt how to render the fat) with madiera sauce, followed by champagne and strawberry jelly. I'm not in this picture, as I took it!