New eats

After going to Italy and Sicily last year, it's been on my list to make my own arancini. 

Arancini are fried risotto balls, the exact specifics inside differ from region to region and whilst we were away, we had a lot with tomato sauce and peas in. 

I had a few friends due for dinner so decided this was the time to try them out. 

The night before I made pancetta risotto and left it to chill in the fridge overnight. Then before my guests arrived, I shaped the risotto into balls and coated with egg and breadcrumbs. 

I got the table ready - as arancini is essentially carbs fried in breadcrumbs, I served them with cured meats, pickles, olives and salad - and once my friends arrived, I fried the risotto balls in some oil. 

They're actually pretty simple and stress free to do - recommended - although I imagine the ragu ones would be harder! 

Also, in other food news, after a year of wanting to go, last week I finally went to Honey & Co. They recently won Best Newcomer at The Observer Food Awards. Since it had taken us so long to visit, we decided to go all out and have 3 courses. My friend and I shared the warm artichoke salad and chicken liver baklava (it was in a pistachio nest) for starters. For mains, we had the chicken in a flatbread thing (had a better name than that), and the hake fish cakes served with cous cous. The chicken was cooked in a sweet sauce and served with a pomegranate salad. And for dessert, we had the chestnut and pistachio cakes. 

It was all amazing - they also sell a vaiety of homemade jams, curds, biscuits, etc. Good for  Christmas presents!

All photos my own

Pasta adventures

Last week, I made pasta for the first time. I had acquired a ravioli mould from a vintage market in Bristol the weekend before, so set out to make ravioli. 

I had also received the book 'Italian Food' by Elizabeth David as a present earlier this year, so I found a recipe in there to get started with. First published in 1954, David was the first chef to really bring Italian food and cooking to the British public. I also really like the look of The Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking - it has pictures for a start - but I already have several cookbooks that aren't as well thumbed as I'd like. 

I decided to use the cheese mixture from David's ravioli caprese recipe - essentially lots of parmesan and gruyere (in absence of some caprese goats cheese or something) with some eggs and seasoning (nutmeg, marjoram, salt and pepper). In this recipe, it mentions that some believe basil to be a foreign interpretation of Italian spices, and that you should only use marjoram. David doesn't make a firm stand on this but I decided to use just marjoram, partly because I had never used it before! She suggested using a different pasta recipe for this ravioli but I decided to use the standard one (taken from her tagliatelle recipe) - apparently it's harder.

David suggested using unbleached all purpose flour, I bought the special pasta flour '00' (Italians grade their flour differently to us, '00' means the whitest flour). 

I'm generally not keen on rolling out pastry so did struggle rolling out the pasta flour. And post-cooking, we thought perhaps we hadn't rolled it thin enough as it was a bit more al dente than anticipated. 

Our first batch was perhaps a little too full of cheese mixture so it was harder to seal the parcels, but most turned out pretty well and the cheese mixture was very yummy when all melted.

Flour is just about big enough for mould

Adding the cheese mixture

Waiting to be cooked

Sustenance

Recently, I've found that I cook less. Since moving in with my boyfriend, he generally handles the dinner, it's not something to complain about but I have missed cooking. 

Last night, I decided I would cook something completely new each week - it's very easy to fall into the trap of making the same dinners when you're tired after work but it tends to get a little boring. Obviously when you have people around for dinner, you tend to push the boat out, but that doesn't happen every week and I want to cook more for myself - without sounding like I'm been selfish.  

So yesterday, I made a bean 'cake', served with sour cream and broccoli. I use the term cake lightly, as whilst in the pan, the ingredients looked cake like but when I tried to serve it up, it crumbled. Still tasty though: spring onions, yellow pepper, borlotti beans, black eye beans, breadcrumbs, mayo, coriander, basil and seasoning. 

Other happenings, over the weekend, I started to watch Top of The Lake (5 hours of it!), a BBC4 drama with Elisabeth Moss and Peter Mullen. I'm enjoying it, almost like Twin Peaks without the surrealness - more of the underlying criminality/twisted nature of small town elders. 

I also went to see Frances Ha, written by Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig and starring Gerwig as the lead. I loved it, Gerwig is so endearing and it was great to see a film about girls not about boys. The film's crux isn't whether Frances will find the one! Shock horror! This is one of my favourite of her expressions: 00.51.

People will probably call it a post-Girls thing but as much as I enjoy Girls, Hannah (Lena Dunham) is a self obsessed d*ck, she's a girl you'd probably would only want as a party friend cause you can't rely on her for anything. Frances is genuinely nice and whilst she makes her mistakes, they aren't done maliciously. 

Had quite a lazy weekend then. 

Oh and last night we saw Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa, very enjoyable.