dulcis in fundo

A few weeks ago, as I mentioned in a previous post, my partner was in Athens for business, and I was left alone in London craving souvlaki, Greek pizza and everything else that he was posting in facebook as a status update with the words "I am eating Greek X now...yuuummm". However, to make it up to me (all those hours of suffering looking at facebook photos with my friends...grrr...) he was contracted to carry back a suitcaseful of Greek treats, plus the greatest (and heaviest) of them all, my mom's ancient pasta maker.

This little gem, a Marcato Ampia, was bought sometime in the 1980s by my mom who thought it would be a trendy item of kitchenalia (things imported from Italy were a big deal at the time in the Greek culinary gadget world!), plus it might at some point help her in making filo. Yes, filo. Now, anyone who knows what filo is can guess that the experiment failed miserably, and the pasta maker (clue, the suggested use is "in the NAME" μαμά!) stayed stacked in a cupboard, miserably gathering dust over the years, as my mom proclaimed "this metal thing is rubbish, all dough stick and do not clean!" (forgive the stereotypical Greek "translation"). After having gone through dozens of cookbooks, online recipes, and Italian friends' stories, I realised that making your own fresh pasta is not a scary task, and remembered the poor old Marcato, and resuscitated it finally!

My partner might have grumbled about carrying all that weight (mom had persuaded me it weighed only 1 kilo - more like 4 that is...), but in the long term he has come to terms with the "inconvenience", as the pasta this machine makes is AMAZING! And since I paid nothing for an "antique" item, I can't even complain about the investment. Plus there's something essentially romantic about kitchen bits and pieces being passed down from generation to generation (even the unused ones!), that makes me a bit sentimental.

Anyways, so pasta machine in hand (or rather on counter - it's too heavy to carry around purposelessly) I was ready for experimentation. And what would be the first recipe? Lasagne, tagliatelle, linguine? Nah, I need more challenging stuff, with filling! Quick search in my head, quick search on the internet, and definitely butternut squash overpowered all other options. I absolutely love ravioli di zucca al burro e salvia (pumpkin and sage ravioli) and as I had some butternut squash and pine nuts, I went for a classic recipe by Rick Stein, changing a few things along the way, and getting a few invaluable tips from Italian friends.

The ravioli turned out amazing, the filling was the best one I've had (up to now my favourite shop-bought ones were the award-winning Tesco Finest Pumpkin Ravioli) and definitely was beyond compare with even the Tesco ones! If you don't have a pasta machine it's still possible to make homemade pasta, but much more effortful, and since you can buy one not too expensively, it's highly recommended. You know what goes in your pasta, it can be as fresh as your eggs, and you will choose your filling, amount of salt and everything else (I actually didn't need to put any salt at all, the parmesan is enough, which is an extra bonus!)

Put the cubed butternut squash in an overproof dish, toss with the olive oil, the fennel seeds and some black pepper and roast for 30 minutes at 220°C until tender and caramelised. Cool slightly and mash with a potato masher.

Pour the flour in a bowl and make a well in the centre. Break the egg in a separate bowl, beat well and pour into the centre of the flour "well". With a fork fold in the flour gradually from the outside of the egg towards the centre, mixing well constantly until it's all incorporated, then dig in with your hands and knead until you have a smooth soft ball. If it's too sticky add a bit more flour, if it's too dry add a bit of water, but if your egg is medium sized it should all work perfectly fine. Wrap the ball of dough with cling-film and leave in the fridge to rest for at least 15 minutes.

In the meantime prepare the filling by mixing the mashed butternut squash with the rest of the ingredients in a bowl. Once the pasta has had its rest, divide it into two bits and pass each one through a pasta machine, finishing with setting No 7 (the thinnest in my pasta machine). Lay one sheet of pasta on the counter, and place small spoonfuls of the filling in regular intervals, making sure to leave some space between them for the dough to stick. Wet the dough by dipping your finger in a glass of water and rubbing "water lines" between the filling and on the edges. Cover with the second sheet of pasta, pressing down to close and stick, and then cut with a pasta cutter between the ravioli, or if you don't have one you can use a pizza wheel (that's what I did!) or a knife. Trim the ravioli if some are too big and boil for a good 6 minutes (try them to make sure they're not undercooked, it will all depend on the thickness of your pasta sheets) in well-salted water.

Melt the butter with the sage leaves in a small saucepan, drain the pasta and toss in the melted butter, topping with lots of parmesan and some black pepper.

Preheat the oven to 200°C, and put some paper cupcake cases in a 12-muffin/cupcake tin. Mix the eggs with the sugar until light and fluffy, then add the milk and oil and combine well. Gradually add the flour mixed with the baking powder, salt, lemon zest and lime zest. Spoon the mixture into the cupcakes cases and bake for 25-30 minutes.

In the meantime make the lemon icing by mixing the sugar with the lemon juice quickly with a wooden spoon. Cool in the fridge until the cupcakes are out of the oven and totally cooled. Spread the icing over the cooled cupcakes and decorate with the lavender flowers.

I know I haven't written a post in a while. A long while. The main reason is that winter has brought with it the infamous English 3 o'clock nights (where by 3 o'clock in the afternoon everything is pitch black) meaning that taking decent photos of things I cook after work (which is mainly when I cook!) has become virtually impossible. As an antidote, we generally try to stay away from this country at this dreary time, and this has resulted in quite a lot of travelling, which – while full of food as usual – does not frequent blogging allow (in Yoda mode). However, since most have been asking for it and have been waiting for it, I wanted to at least post some photos of the most beautiful and delicious things I've had in my travels over the past few months.

2010 being the year of weddings, my three trips in November and December were all in order to attend weddings of friends scattered around the globe. Having being invited to 10 weddings since May, I was at least glad to be able to attend 4. And a funeral. But that's another story...

So, on we headed to Mexico for my boyfriend's good friend's wedding in the beginning of November, and since we were there anyway we decided to stay for 2 weeks (you don't go to the other side of the world and not take advantage, you might as well make the jetlag worth its while!) and visit a couple of places I had never been to before, namely San Miguel De Allende and Guanajuato. They were both beautiful, and I definitely recommend them. San Miguel is this artists' paradise, with picturesque houses in all kinds of colours, lovely relaxing courtyards and lots of good food! And Guanajuato is a bustling student city that competes with San Miguel for the Most-multicoloured-Mexican-city Award.

To start things off though, we first stopped in Mexico City, where my boyfriend's from, and where I've been 3 times before. And when in Mexico City the musts for me are: Brunch at Las Lupitas (lovely little place in Coyoacan, top left photo), some amazing steak and chips in a basket made out of potatoes (!) in the Argentinean Cambalache, and some freshly made tortillas from the corner shop, where they just taste divine warm out of the comal, sprinkled with some salt and rolled up. Mexican heaven...

And then, to finish it off, some cajeta crêpes, and cafe de olla! This coffee is possibly my favourite in the world, no matter how much I like espresso and Greek coffee (Turkish coffee actually, the Greeks just like to call it Greek, chauvinistic remnants of the Turkish invasion of Cyprus...) this just beats them all to a whimpering submission. Flavoured with cinnamon and pilloncillo (raw cane sugar) and "cooked" in a clay pot, even thinking of the earthy smell of this coffee gives me a warm fuzzy feeling! And since we were around during the Mexican Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead), we also got to get some sugar skulls as presents, along with a variety of sweets which you can find in the ubiquitous sweet shops scattered in Mexican markets.

On next was the wedding. Of course Mexican weddings revolve around food, food and more food. You start with a tamarind margarita (with salt and chilli powder on the glass rim) at around 1, then go on to lunch, best bit of which was the shark gordita (had tried shark before but I wasn't impressed, this time it was mind-blowing!), desserts (some meringue/cream/fruit concoction that was positively cloud-esque) and then some dancing, more food, dancing, oh, let's have some Mexican sweets, dance a bit more, damn! it's already 7 at night, let's have someone bring around tortas ahogadas (oh god, that was spicy like hell, but oh so delicious I just couldn't stop having more and more despite burning to death... even thinking about it I'm drooling now!) and then on and on the feeding frenzy went!

We tried to pace ourselves, as we knew the next morning we had to have breakfast (the hotel had really cutely enveloped their butter in corn husks, making it look like mini tamales!), and then go to the newlyweds' house for post-wedding brunch. Yes, as if we hadn't been fed constantly until 1 o'clock the previous night (normally it would have been until 5 o'clock in the morning, only it was so bizarrely cold that the wedding guests ran home earlier than expected! Cold in Mexico...who would imagine!), we had to now choose between pozole and chicken flautas. Guess what. I had BOTH. I love chicken flautas, but it was the first time I tried pozole and I have to say it's not my thing. Thank God, at least there's one Mexican thing that I won't need to add to my already full belly next time I go there. Unlike tortilla soup. Oooooh, the tortilla soup. With little pieces of avocado. And chillies. And cheese. Miam miam is all I can say. Drooling just thinking about it now...

Next stop on the world trip was Athens, this time for my friend's wedding. My friend being a sweet-toothed girl we indulged not only in the prettiest wedding cake ever (served as individual mini-cake portions!) but in a selection of other little pots of pleasure, all of which of course I had to try. Initially I thought "Just a spoonful of each, so I can tell her which one was the best" and then after I saw that no one was eating the rest, I had to have them all. We don't waste food in my house, and especially cute desserts! (even after an endless wedding buffet!) After a brief stop in Rome to visit a very good friend of mine, who literally showered us in freshly-cut salami and fed us for 10 hours a day during Christmas and Boxing Day, we were off to Palermo in Sicily for the last wedding of the year. Having eaten quite a lot (as you can see by the above) during the preceding months, this was the top of the iceberg. Italians eat a lot, they eat even more in weddings, but what we didn't expect was a 10-course meal of the most amazing variety, of which we could eat a forkful each time, as we were waiting for the next and the next. The one thing that I positively devoured all of, was this sublime salad topped with the most amazing tuna carpaccio (marinated in a toasted hazelnut emulsion) I've ever tasted. I still have drooly dreams about it!

And just as you thought this madness might come to an end, here comes January, with its "most depressing week of the year", which we spent safely tucked in the sun of Singapore and Bali. Quick walk through Little India where colourful bananas were scattered everywhere, and then it was time for some famous Singaporean chilli crab in Jumbo. Burning hot, but oh so good! Even the getting messy bit was enjoyable. A few days later we were having rijsttafel in Bumbu Bali in Tanjung Benoa, and trying some of the best curried fish cooked in banana leaf in Sails in Amed.

A big handful of freshly grilled prawns on the beach (these are what I call gigantosaurus prawns!) were followed by pancakes with palm sugar (that even beats cajeta!) and some of the best food we had in Bali which was in a little café in the middle of the rice fields near Ubud, called Sari Organic. If you see "chicken with mushrooms" in a menu in Britain you definitely don't expect what you see above, and some more palm sugar adoration ensued when our banana fritters arrived with some extra yummy syrup of the palmy kind.

Ubud being kind of the touristic centre of Bali you can find some amazing food there, but we were also lucky to be staying in the area while a religious festival was taking place and the Pura Desa temple was covered in offerings consisting of the most amazingly arranged towers of... food! Apart from cakes and fruit there was also a pretty intricate "chandelier" of meat skewers and I can say my mouth stayed open for quite a while when I realised what it was, as from far away it just looked like a flower arrangement! Having gotten hungry with the cornucopia at the temple we had some sticky cashew nut chicken for dinner, followed by a modern twist to the traditional black rice pudding.

Last but not least, some of my favourite things that I tried in South East Asia were the Indonesian crackers (kind of like the Chinese prawn crackers but waaaaay better!) and SHOCK SHOCK SHOCK, pizza! There were two amazing varieties. One in Gili Air, a tiny island near Lombok, which – sans electricity but for some hotel/restaurant generators – has devised an ingenious idea. Wood-fire pizza ovens. Yes, pizza in Indonesia. And if you manage to get lucky, you get some Italians who have permanently moved there to make the most amazing prawn and mushroom pizza ever for you. Best dough I've had in life, and despite my severe scepticism about combining seafood with cheese, this was one of the most amazing pizzas I've had in the world. Including Italy. Sorry Italians, please don't kill me, did you notice I said that IT WAS AN ITALIAN who made this? Albeit in far more exotic lands. The other amazing pizza was in a Japanese place in a super-mall in Singapore. Again, despite the aforementioned scepticism, and bearing the good experience in Gili Air in mind, I was stunned by how good this prawn, bacon and wasabi mayo pizza was. Yes, wasabi. The Japanese are crazy with their culinary combinations, but that only makes me love them more. Japanese has to be one of my favourite cuisines right now. Definitely.

Ah... so that was eat [sic]. And if you didn't have enough already, I leave you with a smile on a plate...

We all know the usual pre-Christmas restaurant outing/outrage. Desperate office boys and girls around London huddle around overpacked restaurants, eat restrictive bland 3-course menus with 2 choices of main, 2 of starter and (if you're lucky at all) 2 choices of dessert. Add to that the embarrassment of having to quickly wolf down everything so you can be out of there before the minus two hours of the booking are finished (and your double-decker has turned again into a butternut squash). And what about having to pay anything from £35 to £extortionate, upfront when you make the booking, AND getting charged full price if one unlucky sod happens to fall ill in the snowstorm? There you go…now you've got your typical London Christmas party. And "due to extreme popularity, we are only able to accommodate your group for a Christmas dinner on the 19th of November". Don't tell me you haven't heard this one! Christmas is Christmas, and whether you like it or not, a dinner in November does-not-a-Christmas-party-constitute, in anyone's (and much less a foreigner's) book.

Hence, this time my international colleagues and I went for an alternative Christmas dinner. One where you get your hands dirty (and sticky!), one that requires at least one full body apron per person, no loose hairs and future wonderment on how flour has managed to end up everywhere (including the inside of your underwear!). What I'm talking about is an evening spent making bread (and eating it) in the e5 Bakehouse. Ben McKinnon's love child is a lovely bakery squished under one of the London Fields train station arches, which dishes out yummy organic loaves. The master feature is the wood fire oven that Ben and his sister designed and built from scratch, using information found on the internet and reclaimed materials. Despite being mismatched, it's extremely pretty, sitting there and puffing fire like a gentle ancient dragon.

We ended up in the bakery after my friend Natalia (who lives nearby and met Ben when she was passing by and smelt the bread, leading to a small coffee-making day collaboration) thought it would be a good alternative idea and a great chance to avoid the usual pre-holiday restaurant rat-race. And what a fantastic idea it was. After we confirmed numbers, Ben kindly booked us in to come and make some great ciabatta breads on a freezing Thursday evening. Thinking that we would be eating only the bread, we brought along some nuts, olives, cold meats and LOTS of cheese and wine to go with it. However we were in for a surprise...(or two!)

We started with Ben showing us around and passing on the recipe for the ciabattas, and while we got messy measuring water, flour and leaven he showed us the next steps, which involved a lot of waiting for the dough to rest, and not as much kneading as I actually expected. After an initial mixing and resting we folded the dough by lifting it off the edges of the bowl with a spatula, from the outside towards the centre, something that was repeated again two times after intervening rests and cheese-and-cracker-nibbling.

After the few times of folding and resting were over, we transferred the dough into a well-floured surface, where we stretched it, and finally decorated it with rosemary, olives or sundried tomatoes, and - following the example of the Italians in the team - drizzled it with olive oil and spread a few salt flakes on top.

Then we moved on to the long table that Ben's girlfriend had cutely decorated with tea lights and where all our cheesing and wining was previously performed, and heard something about "dinner". Thinking that was the bread we had just baked, we were shocked to discover that the guys had even made some vegetarian lasagne for us which were followed by dreamy mince pies (I had been eyeing those earlier when they were patiently sitting in the bakery shelves, but I had no clue some of them were meant for us!)

After being totally filled up to the brim with food, we finished off with some freshly brewed coffee from Square Mile that Natalia had brought with her and went off into the frost with our little bags stuffed with leftover ciabatta and some of the signature Borodinsky rye bread that Ben had also made for us and which we "styled" into the bread tins.

An amazing night overall, and an amazing bakery, go in and get a loaf any time you're around Hackney, or visit the Bakery's facebook page to stay updated on future events and baking classes, which take place usually on Saturdays.

Arch 402, Mentmore Terrace

London, E8 3PH