Kitchen playtime: Summer produce is finally here!

Well, I've been here, there, and everywhere, or that's how it seems. The past month and a half has included trips to North Georgia, Athens, Dallas, Seattle, Okanagan Valley, and Vancouver. I do plan to blog on some of those, but I wanted to get back to the basics. I'm ready to get serious about reporting on my kitchen playtime, which I will try to do every week. Yes, I hear you scoffing. That only motivates me further. Hmph.

Here in the South, we have four seasons:  rainy, pollen, hot/humid, and dark too early but pleasant. You can guess where we are now with highs in the nineties and humidity that makes my naturally curly hair shrink up about an inch every time I walk outside. Mindfulness teaches us that nothing is all good or all bad, so as much as we hate going outside in the summer, we do get the benefit of amazing summer fruits and vegetables. Here in Atlanta we have several farmers markets that focus on local organic produce, and Hubby and I hit the Freedom Park market yesterday after we ran the Braves Country 5K. Yeah, next year I think I'll go back to my "no races during the summer" rule.

My first two recipes are courtesy of the July and June 2015 issues of Cooking Light, respectively. In the first, Greek Tomato Cucumber Salad with Farro, they return to a familiar combination of tomatoes, cucumber, feta, and vinaigrette that they first introduced me to in the early 2000's with wraps, which I couldn't find the recipes for. Let's play compare the pictures. Here's what their salads looked like:

And here's mine:

Yes, it's in a big bowl because we doubled the recipe so we could have leftovers for lunches. But aside from the plating difference and the fact that their recipe hides the farro and includes the cheese, I'd say I got close. The farro cooked quickly, and the biggest hassle of the recipe was all the chopping, but even that wasn't so bad, especially since I got the pre-halved, pitted kalamata olives. The best part - it didn't heat up the kitchen.

The next recipe, Tomato-Leek Pie with Quinoa Crust, didn't have that advantage. It's not a quick recipe, and it, too, has a lot of chopping but this time in a kitchen with a preheated oven. We were so hungry by the time it was finally done I didn't get a picture until after we'd gotten into it:

I have a habit of buying berries when they're in season and then freezing them with all the best intentions of making smoothies. This can result in us having several "vintages" of berries. Since the oven was already on, I decided to go ahead and clear out last year's vintage as well as a few stray strawberries from 2012 (don't ask) and make a mixed berry cobbler:

Oh, and some of the blueberries had already been used for pancakes this morning:

The cobbler recipe came from The Joy of Cooking, and the buttermilk pancakes from Cooking Light. Links not included because I couldn't find the CL one, and the Joy of Cooking is a book not a website.

Finally, our wine of the week is the Thralls 2014 Rosé of Pinot Noir. I once overheard one guy say to another at a rosé tasting, "If you're a dude drinking pink wine, you're going to have to take some [stuff]." It's really good, and even if you're a dude drinking this pink wine, you have nothing to be ashamed of. Hubby, who is notoriously picky about rosé wine actually likes this one. It pairs well with vegetables, light grilled meats, and hot flashes. We're in the wine club, so we got a discount, but this one is well worth the price.

So where do you go after all that lovely vegetable-ness? We ordered pizza tonight.

Oh, and to share my kitchen dumbassery of the week, I found out that when berry juice goes all over your counters from berries that thaw way more quickly than you expect, it looks like someone was murdered.

Have a lovely week! Just a reminder, if you'd like to sign up for my newsletter to find out about my books, sleep tips, and extra wine info, click here. I only send one out every one to two months, so you don't have to worry about getting them too often.

The Great Pasta Project: Attempt One

When making pasta, be sure to have plenty of booze on hand.

For those who are wondering, being half Italian does not automatically confer pasta making skills upon you.  My first couple of tries at fresh homemade pasta resulted in thick lumps of chewy dough with sweet potato in the middle that I euphemistically called "ravioli."  The problem wasn't necessarily the recipe, but rather that I couldn't get the dough thin enough by hand, not even with a tapered rolling pin, so the texture was off.

I'm a perfectionist, so this failure to make good pasta by hand really irked me.  I determined that the fault was not mine, but rather my inferior tools, so I hinted at Hubby that I would like a pasta making attachment for my Kitchenaid mixer.  This was my Christmas present:

Yes, he likes pasta, too.

Rather than start with something easy like long noodles, I decided to dive right in with butternut squash ravioli based on this recipe from Cooking Light.  Instead of using wonton wrappers, I made my own pasta dough.

So, first step, make the dough itself.  The Kitchenaid recipe that comes with the ravioli maker is simple enough with just four ingredients:  flour, eggs, water, and salt.  Mix for a bit with one attachment, then for a while longer with the dough hook.  The pasta dough, not being in an agreeable mood, attacked the dough hook like sentient swamp ooze on a tourist:

Um, yeah, I know what that kinda looks like.  A geoduck!

It's resting...and plotting.

I rescued the dough hook and took over the kneading by hand.  The dough took a lot of flour before it became tacky rather than sticky, or so I thought.  I let it rest and made the ravioli filling, then grabbed the pasta rolling attachment.  I fitted it to the Kitchenaid on the first try.  My first roll was a bit short, but okay.  The second one came out perfect:  long, lovely, and silky.  I put it on the cutting board, which I thought had enough flour on it, and covered it with plastic wrap.  Then I did the third and fourth sheets, also pretty, but not quite so much.

I let the sheets rest for the requisite ten minutes, switched out Kitchenaid attachments for the ravioli one, and read the directions twice.  This is where the dough really started messing with me.  The first step is to take a sheet of dough, fold it in half, put the folded end in the ravioli maker, turn it a little to catch the dough, and then allow the two ends to drape gracefully over the sides.  I did that with the pretty second sheet and got as far as folding it in half and anchoring it in the ravioli maker.  Then it wouldn't unfold.  Crap.  Lesson learned:  when they say to dust the dough with flour, they're not kidding.

This is supposed to make it easy.

That sheet ended up being rolled out again.  I attempted the ravioli with an adequately dusted pasta sheet, which anchored and draped as it should have.  I started cranking, and the dough started laughing at me.  Okay, not literally.  The directions say to make sure the ravioli are coming through but don't have any tips as to what to do if they don't.  The attachment should make a ravioli sheet of three across, but only one came out, and I swear it looked at me like a good kid with two naughty siblings:  "See?  I'm doing what I'm supposed to do."  I figured out that the ravioli had stuck to the roller closest to me and gently released them.  They didn't turn out pretty, but they did have stuff in them.

So those were the first ravioli.  I managed to fix that sheet before it got too messed up, and then, overconfident, I proceeded with the second.  This is where I really screwed up, or maybe the dough got smart.  I watched the roller closest to me, but unbeknownst to me, the ravioli got sneaky and decided to stick to the other side.  By that point, I was in pasta-making denial:  "I can't really be screwing this up that badly."  But I was.  Half of that sheet turned into a squashy, doughy mess before I figured out that you have to gently fondle the dough as it comes out of the machine to make sure it's passing through and dangling as it should.  If I can offer a euphemism to my romance writing colleagues, you could refer to…  Never mind.

At least they're tasty.

I salvaged enough dough to roll another sheet and ended up with about sixty little ravioli.  Approximately a quarter of the dough and a fifth of the filling were a loss.  By the time I finished fighting the dough, cooking it, and making the pesto, four hours had passed from my initial optimistic mixing of the dough to dinner.  Hubby, being the wise man that he is, didn't say anything other than it tasted good.

So, here's what I learned:

Use flour liberally on the pasta, on the ravioli maker, and pretty much on anything that doesn't move fast enough in the kitchen.  Okay, maybe not the cat.

Watch the pasta dough at every step.  It's sneaky and defiant.

The ravioli attachment has plastic guides for the ravioli that open for cleaning.  Watch out, they bite.

Choose and pour cooking wine ahead of time.  Yes, I did all this without wine.  Maybe that was my problem.

I think I'll make pappardelle next time.