Have a careful guess on what this post is all about. No, sorry, you are wrong, it's not all about cheese. What a misleading way to put a title of a blog post. How can I do a thing like that? Yes, just go for it and write it.
While I love cheese very much and all that, this is not going to be a post dedicated to cheese. And this is not a report of about the German cheese museum or a cheese festival that is taking place near to the museum and ... in fact is taking place next month and ... it's not too far from my place. Well, who knows, maybe I get the chance to visit it and then I could write something about it, but now it's simply a recipe containing quite some cheese. That dish is a pasta recipe with a cheese sauce, not just one of those where you put two kind of cheeses in or even three. No, it's Pasta with Quadruple Cheese Sauce.
Let us have a closer look at what we need and how we could go about.
Ingredients:
250 g Ricotta
250 g Gorgonzola
100 g Emmental
50 g Parmesan
2 hands full of cherry tomatoes, halved
2 cloves of garlic, sliced
Salt and pepper
Oil for frying
Yes, of course, pasta
Method:
Note the time your pasta needs to cook. It depends on type and size and when you make fresh pasta, well you have some extra work, but you will love it even more. Right, I didn't do my own pasta, although I could have done that.
Get a pan and get some oil to a hot temperature and fry the garlic and the tomatoes.
Meanwhile in a bowl over hot water you carefully melt the cheeses ...as far as they need melting ... in fact it will suffice to melt the Emmental and the Gorgonzola first and then stir in the Ricotta and Parmesan.
Once you have achieved a nice and lovely cheese mixture you can add the fried tomatoes and garlic to it. Check the seasoning ... eh ... we didn't put in anything so far ... so check whether some salt and pepper is necessary and add at own will.
Did you check the time for your pasta at the beginning? Since you can imagine that it doesn't take that long to put together the quadruple cheese sauce, you for sure agree that it's good to start getting the pasta ready at an early stage.
When all is ready ... enjoy ...
So I really hope, I can manage to visit this cheese festival. Do you know how it is when you want to go to so many things and would love to do so many things and in the end you don't even manage half of it? Well, well, well, life is like that ...
... then there are also these things happening in your life, I'm sure I have mentioned it more than once already here, when you go shopping and see certain ingredients and you feel you need to have them, although you haven't planned anything to do with them, then ... I guess it's time for the No Waste Food Challenge from Elizabeth's Kitchen Diary. Laura from I'd Much Rather Bake Than ... is managing the challenge this month.
Well, this time it was the Ricotta ...
... and if you feel like it and have leftover cheese, why not go for a quintuple cheese sauce or even ... but that would be all up to you ...
Who wouldn't like to have a quick and simple snack available for visitors!? Maybe those that never get any visitors ...
Since it is so convenient I very often have ready puff pastry available at home. I never tried to make it by myself before, but maybe this would be something for the to do list. Then again it might be a bit at the bottom end of the top 100.
Anyway, now we want to do a quick and simple snack with that conveniently ready puff pastry and a few other things ...
Ingredients:
275 g puff pastry (depends on the size they sell it)
250 g ricotta
100 g ham, cut into small pieces
25 g chopped dried tomatoes (optional)
A hand full of chopped basil
1 egg
Salt and pepper
Method:
Mix all the ingredients apart from the puff pastry, of course, together in a bowl (or if you have any other ideas on how to do it, just go ahead). After all we want to keep it simple.
Then roll out your puff pastry and spread over it the ham and ricotta mix. Then roll it together so you are having a nice ... eh ... roll ...
While you could put this already in the oven, I decided to cut them at this point. I said we are having ricotta and ham puff pastry swirls. Cutting about 2-3 cm swirls will be fine.
At this point they go to the oven at 180°C for 30 minutes.
Now you can go ahead and serve them. For what occasion would you use those simple ricotta and ham puff pastry swirls?
I have to make a confession. Yes, honestly, I have a problem ... it might even be serious.
It's not life-threatening ... at least not that I know.
To relief the tension a bit I have to say, it has to do with chocolate. I have been busy reading along in blog-world and the posts I read really make me worry. At least they could if I would give in to every urge of immediately running to the kitchen and reproduce the recipe I've just read about.
Well, in one incident I even just did that. It was one evening. I was sitting in front of the computer, feeling quite depressed actually. Therefore following this urge was not a curse at that point, but rather a blessing.
So to whom do I have to be grateful then? It's Choclette and her Chocolate Log Blog. She brought me this.
Apple ricotta cheesecake ... that was it that immediately caught my attention.
Somehow I failed to take some better pictures of it.
I still had some ricotta lingering in my fridge, so I had to go for it. Just lately a neighbour had told me I could take apples from their garden. So it was just perfect.
The recipe you find on the Chocolate Log Blog anyway. Everything went well. I even got a kind of ripple effect as you can glean from the picture. Right, well, there was one thing, I really couldn't cut it into individual pieces, but hey, I could just go for it and spoon it from the tin. After a day in the fridge, though, cutting into pieces was possible ... but I didn't care anymore.
Things are not all that bad. When I say bad, of course, I don't mean bad as in the sense of bad, but just bad. Hm, you know ... hips don't lie.
Why so? There was another lovely recipe from another lovely lady from another lovely blog. This recipe didn't contain any chocolate, but green leaves, fruits and some goats cheese.
On top of it, it was so simple it was put together in no time. What you see is what you get. I wish I could have that at other times in life as well (maybe at work).
Who helped this time?
It was Karen from Lavender and Lovage with her Fresh Fig and Goat's Cheese Salad with Walnuts. As you see on the picture, though, something must have gone wrong. Why I didn't use walnuts, I don't know. I have no problems with them. I even have a large amount of them at home.
That has to remain then another unsolved mystery.
Towards the end, things get dangerous again, but very very dangerous, indeed.
Because of this I like to link to the responsible person twice.
Let me get into detail.
That very person I am talking about is Jacqueline from Tinned Tomatoes. She got me with her Chocolate Tiffin. Why very very dangerous then?
If you have a look at the recipe, you will not fail to notice the usage of 400 g of chocolate.
That's what it looked like. I didn't have all dark chocolate available. This recipe nearly killed half of my choclate supplies (I had to stock up again today).
Just a few days before I tried that recipe. I was talking about cooking to a friend of mine, particularly about a kind of tiramisu I once did. What she was saying about it, didn't fit, but I think it would rather fit to this recipe, because there are certain similarities.
What is he talking about?
Well, there is a German recipe that is called Kalter Hund (cold dog), which is done with butter cookies and choclate. After I finished the chocolate tiffin recipe and had a bite of it later, it just reminded me of that.
Anyway, it tastes very lovely. So I need to be careful as nobody is nearby to help me with that. At least not now.
So far about all that. I still have to try an apple cake, a sea salted caramel cake, some mint cupcakes and some chocolate fondant with balsamic blueberries. Due to this I might be set for the month in the sweet department.
Wish me good luck ... or something like that!
Now we are nearly at the conclusion. This post is an entry for Bookmarked Recipes, the October edition.
It's a very special one, not only because of it being a triple feature, but also because it is kind of reciprocal ... you will figure it out. Or maybe you have to make a confession as well. Do you?
Do you know what it's like when you get up in the morning and thoughts are forming in your head and they keep on working during the day while you are at work and then you travel back home, open the door, get to your kitchen and then you say to yourself: "Now we are going to cook what was up there all the day!"?
It looked a bit like this.
Can you see it? I mean the one on the right said, the au gratin thingy.
I got all my potatoes left in the storage and did the peeling. Next the slicing. There is this useful tool I have somewhere in the kitchen, a kind of mandoline-slicer. In no time you have a couple of tomatoes sliced - thinly.
However, caution is needed. We need to be focused here or otherwise ... well, you get the kind of colour on your potatoes you don't appreciate (OK, the colour is fine, if made from tomatoes). Anyway, I don't want to go too much into detail, do I?
Up to this day I'm wearing the reminder on my right thumb, from when I very quickly (far too quickly) sliced a cucumber. Not pleasant, no, no! Well, it doesn't look too bad, but ... I can't say it often enough: "Be careful when working with sharp objects!"
Back to something more pleasant.
By now you know, we need potatoes. Find out for yourself, how many you like.
What else?
250 g Ricotta (if you know how to do it, you can make your own with milk, salt and lemon)
50 ml cream
100 g grated cheddar
One egg
Salt, pepper, dill
Mix these things together.
Now we go to the sliced - clean - potatoes.
They go to an oven proof dish as shown in the picture above. Then you try to spread the ricotta-mix on it. At this point I noticed that I need to add the cream to the mix (or use milk if you are afraid of the fat).
You repeat that until you have no potato slices and ricotta-mix left. It would be best to finish with the cheese mixture. Then grate some more cheddar over it.
Here comes the point were you want to transfer it to the heated up oven (200°C - what you think?). I thought about 35 minutes would do.
Do you notice something? Well, not? Have a try. The potatoes are not quite through ... back to the oven, 10 more minutes ...
Well, it felt like you need to put it in the oven for about 1000 minutes. Maybe it would have been better to pre-cook the slices for 10 minutes or so. Even tough the slices are quite thin, it still takes some time, when you put them raw into the oven.
Maybe I have to try another time again.
Whatever, once you feel your potatoes are ready serve them with some meat and if you thought about it a salad on the side.
That's how things go, when ideas suddenly get to your mind and then just do it.
You might remember, I even tried to make my own yoghurt, but ... well ... you know!
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