Belle’s note: This potato gnocchi was delicious, and the blackcurrant-beet butter sauce was a wonderful match to the gnocchi, pearl onions and spaghetti squash. Spaghetti squash isn’t one of my favorite squashes, but its slightly crispy texture went so well with the softness of the gnocchi. We had a small amount of leftovers, which were polished off at lunch the next day!

Potato Gnocchi with Roasted Pearl Onions and Spaghetti Squash and Blackcurrant-Beet Butter Sauce
Adapted from Cooking with Canada’s Best

Potato Gnocchi
2 large russet potatoes, quartered
1-2 cups all-purpose flour
Small handful of fresh thyme leaves
Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
2 large free range eggs, beaten
1-2 tbsp olive oil

Roasted Pearl Onions
12 pearl onions, peeled and quartered
1/4 cup olive oil
Sea salt and freshly ground pepper

Roasted Spaghetti Squash
1 large spaghetti squash, halved and seeds removed
1-2 tbsp soft butter
Pinch of grated nutmeg
Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Black Currant-Beet Butter Sauce
125 ml pure blackcurrant jam
8 oz beets, diced (use canned sliced beets and then dice them)
1 tsp ground cinnamon
3-4 sprigs thyme tied together with kitchen twine
1 tbsp butter

Potato Gnocchi

1. Bake the potatoes in a 350 degree F oven until easily punctured with a fork (about 30-45 minutes).
2. Remove the potatoes, peel when cool enough to handle and put through a potato ricer.
3. Combine the potato, flour (start with 1 cup and add more as you mix – some potatoes need more flour then others), thyme, salt and pepper.
4. Add the eggs and mix in gently.
5. Roll out dough into long ropes and cut into 1″ pieces.
6. Boil a pot of salted water, add the gnocchi and boil until they float to the top.
7. Remove with a slotted spoon and toss in the oil.

Roasted Spaghetti Squash

1. Rub inside of squash halves with butter and add nutmeg, thyme and salt and pepper.
2. Place squash flesh side down on a baking pan with high sides. Add water to come up 1/2″ along the sides of the squash.
3. Bake for 30 minutes, uncovered, in the same 350 degree F oven.
4. Scrape the spaghetti squash with a fork to produce long spaghetti like strings. Pace in a bowl and keep warm.

Roasted Pearl Onions

1. Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees F.
2. Toss the onions quarters with the olive oil
3. Season with salt and pepper
4. Roast on a baking pan for about 7 minutes.

Black Currant-Beet Butter Sauce

Mix the blackcurrant jam, beets, cinnamon, thyme and butter in a sauce pan over medium-low heat until thick and velvety (about 15 minutes).

Assemble

Place a portion of spaghetti squash on a plate, add some roasted pearl onions on top, then add potato gnocchi and pour over with sauce.

This isn’t a great picture, but we forgot to take a picture until after everyone had dug in. Trust me, it tastes much better than it looks!

Here’s how this meal happened. It was Monday, around 4 pm, and I was ready to start getting dinner prepared. I’d planned for a  fairly simple dinner: spinach tofu salad with spicy miso dressing, miso soup with tofu and spinach and baked tofu with wilted spinach and peanut sauce. And for those in the family not really keen on tofu and spinach, spaghetti squash with Indian spices. I had all the ingredients and just needed to do all the prep work first, so I could cook it later.

We generally don’t eat before 7 pm which is late for most people, but for our lifestyle it works well. The older two come home from school  and want to snack so to eat at 5 pm (the way I grew up, you could set your clock by when my Mom had dinner on the table) is much too early.

When I first started cooking we would eat at 8, 9 or even 10pm – way too late and not good for the digestion! But I’m a lot better at timing things now, so I’ve moved dinner time to about 7  pm unless we have guests and then we aim for 6 pm.

The problem with my style of cooking is I LOVE being in the kitchen and I’m in no rush to get out, so I don’t care if it takes me three  hours to make dinner or even lunch. It’s relaxing and meditative for me – Zen and the Art of Cooking. Hey, that could be the title of my first book!

I digress.

So everything was ready and then my older son came into the kitchen and asked, what’s for dinner? I told him and the look on his face let me know he was not going to be a happy camper. Then Belle told me our daughter, the vegetarian, wasn’t going to be home for dinner. The menu suddenly seemed really inappropriate. Not to mention,  Dylan wasn’t likely to touch any of it either.

My older son said, “How about something with tomato sauce?” (I think he wanted to order pizza.) So I said, “How about Home Made Pasta and Bolognese Sauce. You know, the one made from steak and takes two hours to make?”

His answer? “Okay!”

So off I went to the butcher for a top blade roast, ground pork, pancetta and to the grocery store for the rest of the ingredients. I got back before 5 pm and started the sauce.

One of my favourite “meat” cookbooks is The New Steak by Cree LeFavour. There is not a page in it that I do not like. Wonderful cookbook! I made the pasta my usual way, rather than following the method in The New Steak, and I made some changes to the Bolognese sauce in the book. One change was prompted by the fact that  it’s hard to find fresh porcini mushrooms and I didn’t want to use the dried ones again, so I substituted shiitake mushrooms.

The finished sauce looks beautiful but some people, who shall remain nameless (his first initial is “Dylan”, by the way), won’t touch it because it has “flavours” in it. “Flavours” to Dylan means anything green, red, purple etc. So I took some of the sauce and puréed it in a blender and voila, no “flavours”. Puréeing is a great idea, because Dylan eats it and still gets some veggies.

A suggestion from a friend is to reserve some of the sauce and make a risotto with it. Now that sounds interesting, and I plan to try that the next time with the leftovers – if there are any.

Belle says: I love this Bolognese sauce, and have asked for it many times – and I don’t normally like pasta with sauce! The slow simmering makes the meat so tender, and the taste is out of this world. I usually have seconds, especially when Ward pairs this sauce with homemade pasta like he did the other night.

Bolognese Sauce
Adapted from The New Steak by Cree LeFavour

4 tbsp olive oil
2 lb top blade roast, cut into 1/4″ – 1/2″ pieces, most of the big fat removed
1/4 lb lean ground pork
1/4 lb pancetta(hot), diced
1 yellow onion, diced
5 ribs celery, diced
1 carrot, diced
1/4 tsp sea salt
1 cup fresh shiitake mushrooms, stemmed and chopped
8 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 cup dry white wine (Sauvignon Blanc or Pinot Grigio)
6 sprigs thyme
4 fresh bay leaves
2 cups organic chicken stock, divided
1-1/2 cups skim milk, divided
5 tbsp tomato paste
1 cup chopped tomatoes and their juices (canned diced tomatoes work perfectly)
freshly ground black pepper
Parmesan cheese (fresh Parmigiano-Reggiano is best and worth it after going to all the trouble of making this beautiful sauce and home made noodles)

1. Heat 2 tbsp oil in a large sauce pan until hot. Add about 1/3 of your beef and caramelize (about 5 minutes). Remove to a bowl and repeat with the rest of the meat.
2. Cook the pork in the same pan and then remove to same bowl as the beef.
3. Lower the heat to medium-high and add the pancetta to the pan (you may need more oil at this point) and brown it (about 5 minutes).
4. Add the onion, celery and carrots, salt and cook for about 5-8 minutes, until carrots are soft.
5. Add the shiitake mushrooms and garlic. Cook for a few more minutes.
6. Turn the heat down to medium and add the wine, thyme and bay leaves.
7. Reduce the mixture while stirring and scraping the brown bits off.
8. As soon as it looks like it’s going to start sticking, add 1 cup of stock and 1/4 cup milk and the tomato paste. Reduce again.
9. Reduce the heat to medium-low and simmer, slowly adding the remaining stock and milk. Cook slowly for 1.5 hours.
10. About 10 minutes before the sauce is done, add the tomatoes and pepper.
11. Adjust for taste with salt and pepper. I don’t find it needs any, especially if you’re adding Parmesan cheese.

Homemade Pasta

This will take less then an hour to make and since the Bolognese sauce was taking 1-2 hours to cook, I had nothing else to do, so I decided to make the pasta instead of using store-bought pasta. See my previous post about making home made pasta in 30 minutes.

I doubled the flour and eggs for this meal so it took longer to roll out the pasta and cut it. For 4 people, use approximately 4 cups of all purpose flour and 4 free range eggs in a food processor. Add flour as required until you get slightly sticky little balls of dough. Remove from processor and divide into 4 equal balls.

Use your pasta machine to roll out the 4 balls, flouring them and stacking them. When finished, lay each sheet out on the cutting board and fold in half, slice with a knife and shake into a large bowl.

Boil salted water. Add 1 tbsp olive oil and cook in batches. Add more olive oil for the third batch.

Note: There is a print link embedded within this post, please visit this post to print it. ]]> http://museinthekitchen.com/italian/homemade-pasta-with-bolognese-sauce/feed/ 4 http://museinthekitchen.com/pasta/30-minute-homemade-pasta/ http://museinthekitchen.com/pasta/30-minute-homemade-pasta/#comments Thu, 15 Oct 2009 17:56:16 +0000 Ward http://museinthekitchen.com/?p=181 You are planning your dinner for your lovely wife (the older two children are out for the evening and Dylan and his friend will want to eat soon), and Dylan says “Daddy, Matthew and I want home made pasta with butter and Parmesan cheese.”

So you start the timer (I think it’s Rachel Ray who says you should always set a timer when you are about to cook) for 30 minutes.

You pull out the food processor, the pasta roller, cutting board, all-purpose flour and eggs.

Put a large pot of water (salted with sea salt) on the boil. I use a colander inside the pot so I only have to take out the colander and not dump the water.

Place two scoops of flour in the food processor, add two eggs, turn on and wait until the dough comes together and it is perfect. You can add flour if your mixture is too wet or another egg if it’s too dry. Then you might have to add flour after the initial mix to see how wet it is. In this case I got lucky and it was tacky but not wet.

Scoop it all out, throw some flour on the table, roll the dough and divide into four balls.

Tighten pasta maker on the table, set to #1 setting, flatten one ball of dough to a disk and run through the pasta maker. Fold it in half and turn 90 degrees and run through again. Repeat this 6 times.

After the sixth time, do not fold.  Turn the pasta maker to the #2 setting, and run through once, then adjust to the #3 setting and run through once. Keep adjusting and running the dough through  until you’re at the #9 setting. Run through once.

The sheet of pasta can be quite long at this point.

Flour the table (I use the table in my case due to a lack of counter space, the size of my cutting board and other equipment on the counter) and lay the pasta on the flour. Sprinkle flour on one half of the pasta and fold in half. Sprinkle flour on top again.

Now we go back to the pasta maker.

Flatten the second ball of dough and turn the setting back to #1. Repeat the process. Repeat again for third and fourth balls of dough.

Take top sheet of pasta and lay it out on cutting board, I leave it folded in half.

Use a knife ( I find a santoku knife works best because it is flat and if you draw a chefs knife across the pasta it will stretch and tear it but the flat knife will cut it completely) and cut each piece of pasta into strips (1/4″ – 1/2″ depending on your preference)

Toss them in the air to loosen them.

Add a tablespoon of olive oil to water (optional) and place half the pasta in the rapidly boiling water until al dente (2 minutes or less). Drain colander or scoop out pasta into a bowl and add remaining pasta until al dente (2 minutes or less) and drain into first batch.

Scoop some into a bowl, add butter, mix it up, add Parmesan cheese and serve.

The timer went go off as the boys started eating the fresh pasta. Easy, fun and quick!!!

Given the time it takes, I don’t think I will ever resort to store bought, packaged pasta again.

You can do this with whole wheat flour, corn flour (gluten free), soba flour or rice flour. The possibilities are endless.

Of course you can always run the large sheets through the fettuccine / spaghetti attachment to the pasta maker and make evenly shaped pasta but this only adds time and now makes it look like store bought packaged pasta – so why bother? Have fun and cut them really thin or wide or vary them for a very homemade look.