Fresh pasta

Okay...this wasn't the first time I have made pasta...but this time I thought I would cheat and make the dough in my my mixer and let it do all of the work of kneading. This turned out to be a huge mistake. I measured everything out and tried to 'set it and forget it!' When I went back to have a look it was basically just dry pebbles of dough rolling around in the bowl. I dumped it out and tried to get it to loosen up and hold together, but to no avail. It ended up feeling like cement and I had to dump the whole thing and start again from scratch. There went 6 eggs....I hate wasting food like that.

I think the problem is that when you are mixing it by hand, you just don't incorporate the flour that you don't need and when you do it in the machine you don't get that sense of taste. Pretty sure you could get it to work, but I've decided it isn't worth the effort!! So I started again and rolled out some lasagna sheets and finished up a lasagna that I'm making for a friend. Which seemed like a good idea at the time, but I got pretty experimental and I'm not sure it is going to be any good. I know she will be honest with me, and I hope at the very least it isn't really horrible. I used artichoke hearts and I think I should have diced them up or something. I also tried to used all roasted tomatoes rather than sauce, and I don't think it was necessarily the right choice. In the end I dumped some canned sauce over it just so it wouldn't be too dry. This bothers me somewhat...but we shall see.

Tomorrow I am going to do ravioli with the rest of the dough that I didn't roll out. I have an idea for a roasted beet and goat cheese filling, with some kind of orange creme fraiche sauce.

I will let you know how it turns out.

Osso Bucco

Made my first Osso Bucco tonight. I have to say it was amazing. We were missing some of the ingredients, most notably the celery for the Mirepoix, but it still came out just gorgeous. I scooped out some of the marrow and ate it just after it came out of the oven. No wonder people rave about this dish. I usually like my red meat rare and bloody, but this was worth it the 1 1/2 hours of braising.

We used chicken stock, but when I try this at home I am definitely going for veal or beef stock just to get that nice dark look and flavour to the sauce.

We also didn't try to make the gremolata, but I can see how that hit of lemon zest would really amp up the flavour in this dish.

I am definately making this again!

My first black box competition

I had my first ever black box competition at my cooking class tonight. I love to cook, and I think I'm usually pretty good at it, but this was a very humbling experience.

I seemed to forget some of the basics of cooking...like tasting as you go and adjusting seasonings. I didn't even taste my veg until after judging and it was waaaay undercooked. The taste was good, but what a rookie mistake. I'm still pretty proud of what I put out there...as I was running around trying to put everything together the sweat was pouring down my face and I was almost panicked.

I'm really glad to have had the chance to do this at least once in my life, and I am definately going to try the recipe I came up with again in my own kitchen to see if I can perfect it!!

On days when I hate everyone!!

So today is one of those days when I hate my job and hate everyone! I am trying to work but daydreaming about opening the coolest little bistro so I can hang out with my customers and cook amazing food. If I'm going to work this hard and be this stressed, shouldn't it be at something I love?!

Have to play hockey tonight, otherwise I would be thinking up the most elaborate meal I can dream of so I can blow off some steam in the kitchen.

Now we're cooking with gas!

While I'm sure a food blog is not at all original, given the wildly successful Julie and Julia franchise...nonetheless...food is my passion, so I am going to go ahead and inflict my ability to gush about the divine taste of prosciutto, and field fresh tomatoes on the rest of the world.

For me, nothing takes the sting out of a bad day at work like coming home and slicing, dicing and jullienning whilst sipping a lovely glass Italian red! Actually, who's kidding who...any glass of wine will do!

So, here we go...