Festive Ravioli

I had been thinking of making a Christmas-style ravioli for most of the week so decided to try and make some as a starter size portion (in case they were horrible!) for dinner on Saturday.

I settled on ravioli filled with roast chestnuts and butternut squash served in a sauce of butter, sage, clementine zest, chestnuts and parma ham.

The first step was to roast the ingredients for the filling. I sliced the squash into 6 and tossed in olive oil, seasoning, allspice and nutmeg. I had thought that it would be easy to "scoop" the flesh out of the squash after roasting so didn't bother peeling it first. This didn't quite happen so will probably peel it first next time.

I also put a small hole in the chestnuts (so they didn't explode) and covered them in foil before putting them in the oven alongside the butternut squash.

Once this was done I peeled the chestnuts setting a few aside (just 5 or 6 of those that came out whole) to use later in the sauce. I blended the rest of them in a food processor until breadcumb size before mixing them with the mashed up squash. I also added a tablespoon of ricotta to help with the texture.

I then made the ravioli themselves using a ravioli tray that I recently bought off eBay. It took most of the effort out of making them and really sped the process up.

It was then just a question of cooking making the sauce whilst the ravioli were boiling. This involved melting the butter with a little oil to stop it from burning. When the butter was hot I added the reserved chestnuts and then the ham and finally the sage and clementine zest. Once the ham and sage were nicely cooked the sauce was pretty much done so I just tossed in the cooked ravioli. I then just served it up with a slice of Dolce Latte cheese melting on top.

Overall I was pretty pleased with how they turned out. The only thing that I think I would change would be slightly less clementine zest, but otherwise I was pretty happy with this latest experiment!

Pull-a-pig

My turn to cook again in the house of dreams. I have been cooking a lot of Italian recently so decided to change tack and went for an American diner classic - pulled pork. If you've never tried it (quite likely if you've never been to the states) it's basically a shredded shoulder of pork that is marinated in various spices and packs some real flavour. If you've ever had a "Pig sandwich" at the Hard Rock Cafe then you are on the right lines.

The best version I've ever had is in a place called Bodeans of which there are several in London. I was introduced to this place by an old flatmate who was American-born and loved it.

I first needed to get the meat coasted in the rub so it could marinate overnight. This consisted of light brown sugar, cinnamon, chilli powder, smoked paprika (you can be quite liberal with this as the sugar will help balace any bitterness and the smokyness is essential), mustard powder, coarse salt, pepper, a little corriander and some onion salt.

The next step is to coat the meat in this rub, you want to make a really large amount of the rub so that you can stuff into the crevice of the pork where the bony parts of the shoulder used to be. I have been deliberately vague with quantities for the above as its quite subjective ehat to put in, personally I love having a lot of cinnamon but this might not be to everyone's taste. As a rough guide use a LOT of the sugar and about half to a quarter that of everything else (except for seasoning) dependant on you taste.

After a good period in the fridge (at least 12hrs is good) you need to prepare the meat for its long cook. Find a baking tray for which you have a wire rack that doesn't quite fit the bottom. Add a few cups of clear apple juice to the tray ensuring that it doesn't come higher than where the rack sits. Place your meat on top of this and wrap tightly in foil so that you think that no steam can escape.

Cook at 150C for between 5 and 6 hours taking care not to unwrap it from is foil prison. Then remove all the foil and whack the temp up to 200C for 45mins. You should have a very well cooked bit of meat that is difficult to remove from the rack without it falling apart!

Using two forks, pull the meat apart into its fibres.

You then need to place it into a large frying pan or wok and add the apple/meat juice that is in the bottom of the tray. You want to reduce it to a sticky, sweet sauce and almost all of the liquid has evaporated. Incidentally, this is where this recipe really differs from what I have had to eat at Bodeans. Their pork is a much drier affair and so is quite different. I suspect that if you were to not do this last step but perhaps dry the meat out in a bit in a smoker you might have something closer to Bodeans.

In the meantime, fry up some American style fries. I find its best to cut the fries well in advance and put them in a bowl in the fridge to dry out ala Heston Blumenthall's chips only without the first boiling.

Now you are pretty much ready to go! Serve it with some toasted buns, your fries, and some coleslaw. You can the accessorise you sandwich however you feel fit; smoked cheese is a good start and add in a good BBQ or blue cheese sauce and you're all set!

Ragú alla casa dei sogni

It was the first official night of the house of dreams last night so I decided to cook up a ragu in honour of the occasion. I didn't really know what time everybody would be turning up and felt that this was something good that I could cook all day and then just throw together when everyone arrived.

I decided on using three meats: minced pork, minced lamb and some salami.
I started by making a soffritto which I read somewhere (can't remember where) should be the basic structure for any ragu. I fried onions and garlic until soft and then added the chopped celery and carrot.

Cooked until soft, I then took the soffritto out of the pan and begun frying the meat. I had coarsely minced the salami and it went in with everything else. I had the burner on full to try and caramelise the meat as I did in the venison ragu.

I caramelised as much as I dared to before adding a few glasses of red wine to deglaze. This was soaked up pretty much immediately by the meat. I then added the tomato puree one tin at a time, cooking it until it had changed colour from red to a brownish colour.


I recombined with the soffritto and added the porcini mushrooms (thanks to Nats for those) and the water that they had been soaking in, along with some oregano and bay leaves.

Whilst I let that simmer in the pressure cooker for a couple of hours I got on with making the pappardelle pasta. This is my favourite shape for ragu as I think it holds the sauce better than a spaghetti or linguine and there is something satisfying about the thick loops of pasta with rich ragu nestled beneath it. I let it dry out for a couple of hours over a wooden frame while I waited for the housemates to arrive...

I finally put it all together in a large dish so that everyone could just tuck in and help themselves, mopping up any spare sauce with some ciabatta (not artisan this time! Sainsburys seemed to have run out again) and knocking back a lot of red wine. It was the first night of the house of dreams after all. I was pretty pleased with the end result but think i will chop the salami into small pieces instead of mincing as the large bits I came across gave a very satisfying intense bite.

Venison Ravioli

I have been obsessing over making venison ravioli for the last few weeks so finally gave it a shot today and was pretty pleased with the outcome.

I started making the basic pasta, 500g "00" flour and 5 whole eggs (I sometimes substitute one whole egg for 2 yolks if I want a richer pasta but I felt that the filling would stand up for itself).

20 minutes of hard kneading and working later and I had a nice smooth dough. I put it in the fridge until I needed it so that I could get to work on the all important filling


First up, I had to finely chop my onion and mush together the minced venison. I was using venison burgers from sainsburys as they don't seem to have any flavourings in (so a neutral vension taste) and I'm only a poor student and so cant afford steaks to mince myself. I also got out everything else I needed: Cayenne pepper, cocoa powder, red wine and black pepper.



I fried the onion gently until it was nicely translucent before adding the venison and setting the gas on the highest heat possible. My aim here was to try and get some caramelisation on the meat for added depth. You know it's at that point when you start hearing a charactersitic "popping" sound.

I then deglazed the pan with about a glass worth of red wine before reducing. As this gets down to almost nothing add a large pinch of the cayenne pepper and a couple of teaspoons of cocoa (If I were to do this again I would probably use a little more: in the final result there was a nice bitter note but I didn't get that heady chocolate smell that I was after) and plenty of pepper.

I let it cool and begun rolling out my pasta and cutting it into circles before forming my ravioli. This was quite a labourful process as I didn't want the pasta discs to dry out at all before I tried constructing the ravioli as I was worried that the edges wouldnt stick together. This meant that I had to keep doing it bit by bit making a few ravioli at a time.


Soon enough I had a load of them and then left the pasta to dry out a little so that they wouldn't stick together once cooked. I also went out and bought my favourite bread to go with the meal (Niall, this photo is for you)

I simply then had to boil the ravioli up and I had a separate pan at the side that had warmed olive oil and seasoning where I could put the cooked ones to 'dress' them a little (I didn't want to make a sauce as I didn't want to take away from the ravioli themselves). It was also useful whilst I cooked up the other batches.

The final result: