last week

some highlights from last week include:



the new worm farm, with real live worms living and happy inside!



it is a worm farm that is set into the ground in the garden with small holes in the base of it so the worms can come and eat and then go and live and spread their wormy goodness in the garden. so far it seems to be working.

i made this yummy summery salad on the one hot day we have had so far. just rissoni pasta, olive oil, lemon juice, pepper, and lots of fresh herbs, mint, parsley, coriander, basil, celery parsley. and a bit of parmesean. it was so good.

borris and i have been dog sitting these 2 lovely little guys for some friends who were out of town. we had a good time, with lots of walks.

and i got a new soaker hose for the garden.

i have it laid out int he garden to give the new veggies - tomatoes, eggplant, basil, cucumber and zucchini all a good water without having to get the leaves wet.

it was a pretty good week.

ravioli

last week i had some friends over for dinner. i had planned on making pumpkin ravioli.
i managed to talk everyone into helping make dinner.

we had a great time together, many laughs and mistakes, here are the highlights.



we each had a job in the production.



i got to roll out the pasta dough.



dani got to try and problem solve the ravioli tray that was suppose to make everything easier.



but our dough just stuck to the tray. it took dani most of the time to clean the tray to try again.



in the end she did get great results, after so much laughing my sides hurt.



the result on the left is the first ravioli she made, and the one on the right was the much improved second batch.



tip: use lots of flour and don't over fill the tray.



we took over the whole kitchen and flour was everywhere.



shelsy made ravioli the old fashioned way, by putting the filling down on a sheet of pasta.



then covering it with another sheet and pressing it down,

and cutting them with a roller.



she had the hang of this right away.

these are some of the ravioli we made.



they cooked really quickly in the water, the filling was roasted pumpkin mixed with ricotta and parmesan cheese and nutmeg.



i also made a brown butter and sage sauce to go with the ravioli. i had never made it before and it sounded to easy to be true, but it was great.



so after the huge mess, and so much laughing and many many mistakes we did end up with a really great meal, so good that there was none left!

vegetarian cannelloni

sorry about the dark images, but here are a few snap shots of my cooking the other day.



cannelloni is one of my favorite baked pasta dishes, and in finally got around to making it with veggie mince. i fried up onion, garlic, mushrooms, capsicum and veggie mince, then mixed that with mozzarella cheese, before stuffing the pasta tubes full.

the tray then gets covered in pasta sauce and baked in the oven.

the results were so yummy that i didn't even get any "after" shots.

a sure sign of success.

my june garden

this is my june garden. things are looking really good, its easy with all this rain we have been having. although some things like parsnip seem to grow SO slowly. i can barely believe how small they still are after all this time.

my calendula flowers are in bloom and apparently will help keep pests away although something is eating into my kohlrabi. they have been amazing to watch grow, i hope they get big enough to eat, and my celery has been yummy, i just go a pick it off the plant as needed.

these are some veggies i harvested form my garden the other day and used in the veggie lasagna. the radish are very strong, and i actually just found another patch of red radish i thought were beetroot, so if you know of any good uses for radish other than salad i would be happy to hear about them as it appears i have a lot growing.

the other thing i have a lot of is parsley, so the other day i picked a whole bunch of it and made parsley pesto. i also used roasted cashews instead of pine nuts, and it was so good.

i think pesto is one of my favorites, easy to make, satisfying to eat and now growing readily in my back garden almost like a weed.

my first veggie lasagna

i was in my favorite shop the last week Vari's, a great italian grocery store that is run by a family; they still use the old fashioned scales and write it all down on paper and add it up in italian at the end of your order. anyways i was in there getting cheese, and sausage and gnocchi and other yummy food when i saw this package of long tube noodles.



i asked the shop keeper what they are used for and he said that greek people sometimes use them to make a kind of lasagna. you cook them and then layer them in the pan criss-crossing each layer and pouring the sauce over the noodles.

this inspired me to make my very first veggie lasagna using these noodles.



this is my prep for layering it up, tomato sauce, white sauce, mushrooms and onion for one layer, silver beet and garlic for one layer, and capsicum and zucchini fried up for one layer, as well as noodles and heaps of cheese. (my dad once made a lasagna without any cheese and he has never lived this down so never forget the cheese)



this is the first layer of the noodles, not as perfect as i thought but still good.

i called in some help for putting it all together, with borris making a special in the kitchen appearance to help get the layering going.

and voila, the finished product, well before it went into the oven. i never did get an after shot but it was really good looking, nice and brown and crispy on the top and cheesy gooey all the way through. borris and i have been eating it all week, but i think next time i might freeze half of it for a lazy day as i am almost lasagnaed out.

colourful food

last weekend inspired by the beetroot risotto i decided to make myself some fresh pasta. i had bought a large bunch of fresh basil and made some very garlicky pesto. i wanted to have more colour in the meal so i decided to make my pasta red. red and green go together so well.

to make red pasta i mixed up my recipe for spelt pasta as normal but added in some tomato paste as well. this resulted in me needing to add a tiny bit more flour but then the dough was perfect, ready to rest.

then i got out my pasta press machine and rolled out the dough. this is my favorite part, and i am getting better at it.

into the hot boiling water fora few minutes, fresh pasta takes no time at all to cook.

served up with the best batch of pesto i have ever made. i am not sure why this round of pesto was so good but as i ate this meal it was extremely satisfying, to feed me and to know i had made it all, and it worked out beautifully.

homemade spelt pasta and pesto

last year borris gave me a pasta press for my birthday. sadly i barely used it in 2009. but 2010 is all about doing things i didn't do last year. more on that later, but the other day after work around 7 or 8 at night i decided we were having homemade spelt pasta and pesto for dinner.



i had never made spelt pasta before and i have only really made homemade pasta twice before. i wasn't sure how it would turn out.

but as you can see from the images, i seemed to have figured out how to do it.
the secret i think lies in letting the dough rest in between stages of rolling and cutting it out.

i made three trays of this spelt fettuccine. the small amount of dough i started out with made more than enough for borris and i to enjoy.

with fresh pasta it only had to boil for a few minutes in the water and then by 9pm or so it was ready to eat. i topped it off with some fresh homemade garlicky pesto and we had some delicious black russian tomatoes on the side to eat like apples.

ta-DA! there you have it spelt pasta and pesto made by me.