Easy Peasy Fishy Dishy (Lemon Sole with Sour Almond Sauce)

Fish is always a quick dinner and, if you're ok with sorting out the bones yourself, a whole fish is the tastiest of all. Lemon Sole has an mcs rating of 2, or at least the ones caught off the cornish coast are, so no need to feel guilty either.

This is a really tasty sauce to serve with lemon sole, and an uncharacteristically close rendition of a recipe for me, this time from The Abel & Cole Cookbook, I love this book and all the recipe ideas are cleverly grouped by seasonal ingredients. I've used it a lot and can really recommend it.

So, first put some jersey royals on to boil. Or whatever you want to serve with this, personally I couldn't wait to get my teeth into the jerseys, they are so lovely (just in case anyone doesn't know - jersey royals are a very special type of potato grown in, and only in, Jersey!).

Sprinkle a liberal serving of flaked almonds into a dry frying pan and heat until toasty brown. Put them to one side and add oil and a knob of butter to the pan to heat up, at the same time pop the oven onto its lowest heat.

Lightly coat the lemon sole with plain flour, put into the frying pan and cook for a couple of minutes on each side. Pop them into a baking tray and bung in the warm oven, turn it off though as you don't want them to keep cooking, just to stay warm.

Get some spinach (or whatever veg you're having) on to steam. 

Back to the fish pan: be warned this sauce evaporates faster than last month's paycheck, so you need to be on the ball. Make sure the pan is really hot then chuck a glass of white wine in, let it bubble away for a bit and deglaze the pan with a spatula. Squeeze in the juice of half a lemon, and add a heaped teaspoon of capers that you've chopped up, all of the toasted almonds, another knob of butter and a load of fresh parsley.

Turn the heat right down and get the fish, potatoes and spinach onto plates. Spoon over the sauce and eat immediately. Yum.

 

Ricotta & Spinach Ravioli with Sage Butter

I learned to make ravioli and sage butter from Chef Steve Watts, after my first attempt ended up a squishy disaster and put me off making them for several years. They were effortless to make this time though, I think storing them individually and coating them with semolina was the best tip, and a firmer dough really helps. 
I wouldn't necessarily make these for a workday but they are a lovely weekend treat. They don't take too long to make and taste wonderful, but they are not particularly healthy!

I'm assuming that you've already made your pasta and that it's resting in the fridge. Ravioli is best made with slightly dryer, tougher pasta than my usual recipe. I used 2 eggs to 300g pasta and added a little water to bring it together. Kneaded it as much as I could until it had a texture not unlike cold blue-tack. This made a hearty dinner for 2 people, with enough left over to make tagliatelle to dry for later in the week.

Take a bag of spinach and cook through, using a mere suggestion of water to start them off; you want the leaves as dry as possible when they go into the filling. Once cooked, lay them out on a clean teatowel and pat dry.


Use a pair of scissors to cut the spinach into a bowl along with a pot of ricotta, lots of grated nutmeg, pepper and a small pinch of salt. Mix them up and that's the filling done. Try not to eat it all before it goes into the pasta.


Roll out your pasta sheets and pile a small teaspoon of the filling at regular intervals along each strip's length, placing them off-center, nearer the bottom edge. Dab your finger into a saucer of water and dampen the edges and in between the dots of filling, then fold the top half over the bottom half and firm down with the sides of your hands. Press down pretty firmly to make sure they are sealed, then cut into squares with a sharp knife. Sprinkle semolina over a clean tray, lay each ravioli out separately and sprinkle with more semolina.

When you're finished, boil up a huge pan of water and put a sizeable amount of salt in, then add the ravioli. They don't take long to do so keep an eye on them - when they're all floating at the top that's a good sign, a bit like gnocci. 


Put a nice, sizeable hunk of butter in a small pan and heat it up until it's bubbling away nicely, then add in a load of fresh sage leaves and cook until the butter is a lovely dark golden colour and the leaves are crispy.
Drain the ravioli out and lay on your plates. Use a spoon to drizzle the sage butter over the top, serve and then promise yourself you'll go to the gym in the morning.

Pastalicious

Being of partly Italian descent I felt quite ashamed when I hit my late twenties and realised I still didn't know how to make fresh pasta. Then, one birthday, I was given a pasta machine...

Delicious dinners plus absolute disasters ensued. That pasta machine was the target of so much abuse before it finally gave up the ghost, with a last ditch attempt to poison us by shedding metal from its gears into the dough. Yum.
I didn't make pasta from scratch again for a couple of years, it just seemed like too much aggro when perfectly delicious dried pasta was available in the shops. The texture isn't quite the same but dried pasta is wonderful enough and doesn't cause stress spikes in your blood pressure.

I did eventually get another pasta machine though and, with some trepidation, set out to make my own once again.

Pasta is honestly easy to make and absolutely delicious

It's a funny thing, a bit like the gardening, somehow everything just clicked into place. Now whether that's just because I had a bit more general cooking experience or because the new pasta machine isn't harbouring a grudge, or maybe just that I'm less stressed out and happier these days, I've no idea. All I know, is that I do now understand how easy pasta is to make and can't really recall what it was that made it so stressful before.

The ratios I use are about 100g flour to 1 egg, with the average batch being 400g/4 for 2 people to have both dinner and a lunchbox the following day. So, that's 100g/1 per portion or, if you're feeling lazy, just use a teacup to scoop out the flour, you can always add a little water if the mixture turns out a bit dry. Strong bread flour seems to work fine for me but the extra finely ground tipo 00 is the easiest to knead.

Stick the flour into a mixing bowl with a big pinch of salt, crack the eggs directly into the center of the flour and start to combine. It'll turn into a lovely yellowish dough which needs kneading, just like bread, for about 10 minutes. Then wrap it in clingfilm and leave it in the fridge for at least half an hour, preferably for an hour, and no longer than a day.

After it's chilled out for a while, pull it out of the fridge and tear off half or a quarter of the dough (depending on how much you made) and flatten it out on the worksurface with your hands.

Put the pasta machine onto it's widest setting, mine runs from stages 1-7, that probably refers to a measurement of some sort but I've no idea what.

Give the pasta a thin coat of flour and then run it through the machine, put the setting up one and run the pasta through it again, continually flouring at any sign of stickiness. By about stage 4 or 5, cut the strip of pasta in half and keep going. I never take it to stage 7 (the thinnest setting), as I think stage 6 works best. Stage 7 would be good for pressing herbs or flowers between sheets of pasta, I think I saw Jamie Oliver demo that.

Depending on what you want to make, once a strip of pasta is ready you can either run it through the spaghetti or tagliatelli rollers, cut it into papardalle with a knife, or look at making shapes from it - fusilli, farfalle etc.

The most common shape I make is tagliatelli, although today I made lazy pasta - strips of pasta that look like they've been cut by a drunk six year old.
No matter what you make, the one thing I've learned the hard way is that you need to keep pasta floured and don't leave it sitting in a pile for too long or it'll stick together and be a disaster. Make sure all the peices have a thin, floury coat and every now and again toss them about to get air in between them and stop any sticky bits from getting settled.

Whatever you do, don't lay peices of pasta on top of each other to store them. They need to be stashed individually with air all around them. I once stayed up until 2am making tortellini only to come down in the morning and find a dish of squish, completely unrescuable. I haven't made tortellini since as it was an utterly depressing sight, so ignore the above advice at your peril!

Repeat until all the dough is used up and ready to cook. Get a huge pan of water on the boil: whichever saucepan you were thinking of using, use one at least a size larger than that. I used to think this was overkill and unnecessary, it isn't though. Without lots of space for the pasta to swirl around in, it does tend to get stuck together and you can end up with clumps of uncooked bits. Don't bother adding oil to the water, greasy pasta is horrible, just use a big enough pan.
Add a huge pinch of salt to the water, it makes a big difference to how great the pasta tastes.

We're talking just a few minutes before it's ready, it'll float to the top when it is but always do the taste test anyway or you won't get it just the way you like it.
Drain it in a colander but keep a bit of the water left over in the pan too. Add your sauce, mix it up and serve.

The Sauce
Today I made a ricotta and green things sauce. I sauteed up some garlic, onions and celery, added frozen spinach and peas, then some sliced courgettes and finally a pot of ricotta. Salt, pepper, chopped mint, the juice of half a lemon and it's ready to go (don't forget the cup of water left in with the pasta, this provides a bit of liquid for the sauce and the starch, so I'm told, helps it adhere to the pasta).

One final thing, grate a little parmesan over the top. Fabulous!