Caciatelli or Casciatelli molisani. Oven-baked ravioli - a variation of this delicious sweet or savoury dish

This  dish is marvellously versatile, it comes originally from the Abruzzo and Molise regions of south-central Italy. It can be sweet or savoury, picnic or lunch-box, a main dish, a fiddly cheese apéritif dînatoire or a hearty 'pasty' type supper dish. Even the pastry has different ingredients, the one I know of and use is made of equal parts of olive oil and wine. It's also a great accompaniment to fresh salad straight from the garden and you can really experiment with flavours of both the filling and complimentary side dishes.

The caciatelli (made with white wine) above have a filling of sweet potato leaf, which I first sautéed in butter and then added pieces of roasted (foraged) chestnuts. When cooking sweet potato leaves think along the lines of cooking spinach, they only need to be cooked until just soft.

Below is a large pasty version (made with red wine) filled with yellow peppers, oven dried herb tomatoes, and fresh basil. It is accompanied by a fresh green salad straight from the garden, topped with fried ham and a red cabbage dish with apple, raw apple cider vinegar and chestnuts all sautéed in butter.

I also regularly make the traditional Abruzzo - Loreto Aprutino, half-moon shape, filled with cheese, which makes a great appetiser to serve to guests to accompany drinks

Ingredients: for 50 small ravioli or one very large one!

For 500g - 1lb 2oz - 4 cups  of plain white - multi purpose flour

100ml olive oil

100ml wine - if you use Merlot as I did - you get a crazy purple pastry, which cooks to a pleasing rich plummy chestnut colour - see above.

salt and pepper (if required)
egg yolk for brushing pastry.

Oven - preheated to 180ºC or 356ºF

Cooking Time - approximately 20 minutes (You will need to check your ravioli as they cook, I have a wood cooker and the oven has all round heat.

 

Make a well in your flour, salt and pepper and incorporate the wine and oil - I usually mix them together first.

Work the dough with your hands and if required add extra wine and oil, in equal quantities. I don't like to overwork this dough but you can tell easily by feel when it is smooth and elastic and ready to roll.

Roll pastry to a thickness to suit your taste and if you are making one large pasty then roll it in to an elliptical shape. Otherwise make a round, so as to cut the maximum from one rolled out piece. Use a single piece to make the traditional half-moon shape. Remember to cut an even number of pairs to make the round version!

Prepare your filling and leave to cool. Adding the filling when warm will make the pastry soggy and difficult to crisp up. If you have a 'juicy' vegetable, like my pepper mix or sweet potato leaf then drain it with a slotted spoon as you fill the ravioli. The remaining liquid can then be served as an additional sauce. 

Do not overfill the ravioli but leave a rim which can be moistened with cold water and then pressed firmly together. Make a small cut in the top of each caciatelli to let out any steam. Brush the top of each with egg yolk before putting into the oven.

Eat them once cooled with a fresh salad or warm with a hot sauce made from the juice reserved from your filling mix.

Remember by the addition of a little sugar to the paste, you can make this into a sweet dish too. 


Experiment and have fun!  Check around the regional Italian cookery blogs and sites for other versions of this interesting and delicious recipe.

Thanks for dropping by and if you have found this post enjoyable please share and do feel free to comment.

All the best, Sue

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© 2014 Sue Cross

Gâteaux de crêpes, Torta di Crispelle, Pancake Gâteaux Recipe for a hot and cold maincourse/party dish.

Despite the name gâteaux de crêpes, I first found the idea for a pancake gâteaux in an Italian cookbook and have always known it as Torta di crespelle. In France it is often seen, layered with smoked salmon and seafood on a Wedding banquet menu. Our local organic butcher produces them, ready-made for the traditional New Year's Eve dinner and by an amazing co-incidence I ate one last week at a retirement get together.  It's an impressive looking dish, of anything from 8 to 20 pancake layers, sweet or savoury, hot or cold and guaranteed to get a few oohs and aahs from the guests, even though it's normally purchased and yet it is one of the very simplest of dishes to make.

Just down the road and around the bay is Brittany, with a crêperie on every corner and considered as the spiritual home of the pancake. In Breton restaurants they serve the crêpe, wheat pancakes for dessert and the galette or buckwheat pancakes, with savoury fillings. Yet for all that, pancakes and therefore probably the pancake 'cake' started life in Italy, in the Vatican to be precise. According to legend, Pope Gelasius is supposed to have ordered simple, flat, fried 'cakes' to be served to hungry French pilgrims, who had travelled to Rome to celebrate the feast of Candlemas. This festival of lights, which marked the end of Old Christmas, was itself a transformation of the earlier feast of Lupercalia, which was later to become la fête des crêpes in France.

 

So under the inspiration of the windmill from which the above photo was taken, as it gently milled organic buckwheat flour for a whole flock of galettes, I will proceed with the ingredients:

200g - 1⅔  cups - 7 oz of plain white flour

2 or 3 eggs depending on the size

500ml - 16 fl.oz or just under 1 pint of milk ( we use rice or raw)
salt and pepper to taste
butter

 

Make a well in the flour and drop the eggs into it, working inwards with a fork or hand mixer to incorporate the flour and form a smooth paste. Slowly add the milk, whilst continuing to mix and thereby preventing the batter from becoming lumpy. Season to taste and leave the batter to stand. This process allows the air to escape, thus avoiding holy pancakes. If you have the time, you can leave the batter in a cool place overnight but otherwise try to set the batter aside for at least 15 minutes before using. This mixture makes from 10 to 16 pancakes, depending on the size of the pan but there are no real set rules in this dish, even six pancakes with substantial layers of filling will make an impressive cake.

Put frying pan on hot plate, melt a knob of butter in pan, coat base of pan with melted butter. Using a soup ladle pour some mixture into the frying pan, whilst using the other hand to move the batter until it thinly coats the bottom of the pan. 















Leave to cook but use a spatula to lift the batter at the edges, now and again, just to see how it is progressing. 

Turn the pancake over using a spatula or, if you are feeling brave, flip it over with a quick flick of the wrist. As you can see above, we needed this particular batter in a hurry and had no time to leave it to repose, hence the tell-tale tiny holes. 

Store the pancakes in the warming drawer, unless of course you are making a cold pancake gâteaux . 

I like to make a mixture of cold and hot fillings usually salad vegetables, from the garden with layers of lightly fried prosciutto or Parma ham or jambon de Paris. This makes for a very chic dinner party presentation.


 

The paradox being,  I can get the heels of both hams, i.e. the bits that will no longer go into the slicer or make elegant cuts, from my organic butcher for less than a quarter of the usual price.


Et voilà, a dish that looks impressive enough to suggest you spent hours in preparation.  I usually put my cake together at the last minute, that way the salad stuff stays crisp and fresh even though surrounded by warm pancake. Delicate items such as nasturtiums, lettuce and other such edible flowers and leaves are better left to crown the whole. 

You can have great fun with this recipe playing with flavours, colours and textures. My finished version above, includes two layers of one of our favourite home-grown exotics - sweet potato leaves, these have been lightly sautéed in butter with a little red onion.


Hope you enjoyed this recipe, please share and if you have any, comments, questions or observations, do not hesitate to ask.

All the very best and thanks for dropping by, Sue

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© 2014 Sue Cross

Seaweedless Sushi - Making your own home-grown wraps from edible, easy-to-grow leaves.

Sushi is an elegant and nutritious dish any time of the year but as a Summer lunch eaten outdoors with produce fresh from the garden, nothing can top it. However, it is always pleasing to me to grow as much of our daily food as possible and so I just came up with this idea from looking at the seaweed alternatives we had growing around us.

Making your own seaweedless sushi doesn't mean you have to go without wrapping the rice, although this in itself can be both aesthetically pleasing as well as highly edible. Here is a very simple light lunch created from balls of Thai rice just placed on nasturtium leaf wraps. I married them with a confits de tomates and a fines herbes omelette.

Just add a little of the filling, a touch of soy sauce and then pinch the leaf up around the rice, for an easy DIY wrap!

For a more elaborate traditional sushi, I wrap the rice in extra large nasturtium leaves. I don't have a rolling mat but just use eco baking paper. I can then cut them into lengths just as I would with nori. You can also use other leafy vegetables such as cabbage, kale or spinach but the younger and more pliable leaves are easier to manage.

Nasturtium  tropaeolum majus - A valuable food and medicinal plant

Nasturtium is a most useful plant to grow in any garden, not just for decoration or wildlife habitat but because the leaves, flowers and seeds are all edible. They will also grow in poor soil, in containers and as they can be found in both bush and climbing varieties, are eminently suitable for urban or limited space, square foot and vertical gardening. They will also grow in poor soil, in containers and as they can be found in both bush and climbing varieties, are eminently suitable for urban or limited space, aka square foot, gardening. The container-grown climbing nasturtiums, shown left, have been growing here for two years and backed by the stone wall, actually over-wintered and provided us with some welcome additional Winter salad leaves. The plant is perennial but often grown as an annual but it self-seeds freely. These plants are the 'children' of the ones we planted here in late Summer last year and ate in the Winter, all through the Spring and earlier Summer. This photo, taken in Summer this year, shows how the new crop is progressing and unless we have a heavy frost it should keep us going well into next year. All I have done is top dressed with a little home-made compost. The picture of the parent plants, below, was taken in April.

In the past nasturtiums along with sprouted seeds and citrus fruit were used to treat scurvy because of their high vitamin C content, they also contain valuable anti-oxidants. Prized for centuries as a medicinal plant, the nasturtium can be used to treat skin problems, hair loss and has valuable antibiotic qualities.

My particular favourite is 'Jewel of Africa', which is a climber or scrambler with variegated leaves. The flowers come in many different shades and have a spicy taste as do the leaves and make a great addition to a green salad. The seed is pickled to make a cheap but tasty pseudo  caper.

Rice and the Steam Dragon

As for the rice, I cook it in a very ad hoc manner taught to me by a friend who was maniacal about the right way to cook it. Very simply I wash the rice several times in cold water, then cover it with two fingers depth of water. Put it on a high heat, reducing this when it starts to boil to furiously and never open the pan lid, except just to quickly check now and again for when the water has been absorbed - if you open the lid too wide you let out the Steam Dragon. It seems like many dishes, rice is better left alone. Once the water has been absorbed and the rice is very slightly al dente remove the pan lid to allow the remaining water to quickly evaporate, leaving the rice 'dry' and fluffy. If you still have water visible above the rice but the grains have already reached this stage, then pour off the excess water first. If you overcook rice it goes sticky, then it is called 'friendly rice', which I think shows just how forgiving cookery can be!

Bon Appétit!

Thanks for dropping by and hope to see you again. All the best from an old farmhouse in Normandie by the sea, Sue.

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© 2014 Sue Cross