Fresh Pappardelle with Kingfish, Scamorza, and Green Asparagus

In Italian pasta svuotafrigo means to make a pasta dish “to empty your fridge”, i.e. to dress pasta with what needs to be used up. I had some leftover kingfish in my fridge from making sushi and sashimi that needed … Continue reading Fresh Pappardelle with Kingfish, Scamorza, and Green Asparagus

Chard Stems Gratin

I don’t have many leftovers, because I usually cook exact portions. Sometimes I do have leftover ingredients, and I don’t like to throw away any food. One typical leftover ingredient is the stems of chard, because the leaves are used for a recipe such as these lovely pansoti and then the stems are left. From the same pansoti I also had some leftover home made ricotta, and so I decided to turn the chard stems with ricotta into a simple but nice side dish: chard stems gratin. This was easy to prepare and quite tasty. It would be more traditional in Italy to make the gratin using a besciamella (white sauce), but ricotta keeps it slightly ligther and I had used up the milk to make the ricotta. Here’s what I did. Continue reading “Chard Stems Gratin”

Lamb and Eggplant Meatballs

Just a week after returning from my cooking on the boat adventure I have another challenge lined up, as we are participating in the gay pride canal parade in Amsterdam this Saturday and that requires a lot of preparation. As a result, I’m not cooking very elaborately this week and nothing that I haven’t blogged about before. I had some leftover lamb and eggplant ravioli stuffing in my freezer, and since I prefer to make the stuffing fresh when making ravioli for guests, I decided to turn the stuffing into meatballs by breading and frying them. This turned out great: the outside of the meatballs is nicely crispy, whereas the inside is very soft and juicy and tasty. These meatballs are so good, it would be worth making the stuffing just to prepare them.

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What to do with leftover Peking Duck: Pappardelle all’Anatra

When you make Peking Duck, you only eat the crispy skin and just a bit of the meat right underneath. This means that you will have a lot of leftovers: the carcass as well as most of the meat. It is a shame to throw all of this away, especially since you can use this to make a classic Tuscan pasta dish: Pappardelle all’Anatra. The carcass is used to make a stock, and both meat and stock are used in the pasta sauce. The cooking time is quite long, but there is hardly any active time. Here’s how to do it. Ingredients … Continue reading What to do with leftover Peking Duck: Pappardelle all’Anatra

How to make home-made Vegetable Stock

The success of dishes such as soup and risotto depends to a great extent on the stock used. It will be so much better if you make your own stock from scratch rather than using a bouillon cube. I was about to post a recipe that requires vegetable stock, and realized that I had not posted about how to make vegetable stock yet. So this one comes first, and the truffle, leek and shallot risotto will follow tomorrow. The nice thing is that you can make this for free if you save up vegetable scraps in the crisper of your … Continue reading How to make home-made Vegetable Stock