Category: Main Dish

Mushroom Barley & Short Rib Ravioli

If you frequent my blog, you’ve probably noticed that while I love gourmet food, I tend to lean towards quick and easy recipes that I can disguise as fancy. I’m all about the 1-2-3 – as long as it tastes good. But sometimes, just sometimes, I want to take the time to make something from scratch that rivals any dish at a 5-star restaurant. If you have your technique down, and you put love into your food, the results can be beyond extraordinary.

The story of this recipe goes back about a year, when I learned to make pasta from scratch at the Center for Kosher Culinary Arts. I could not believe how incredibly easy it was. We made the pasta dough before I could even blink, and rolling it through the pasta machine was so much fun. Filling our homemade ravioli with duck confit and bathing it in demiglace sauce made me realize just how luxurious pasta can be. I went home that night dreaming up all sorts of amazing pasta creations, none of which actually happened. Until now.


If you don’t know this about me already, I’ve got a thing for mashup recipes. I just love to deconstruct traditional recipes and break them down into playful ideas. So when I learned to make pasta from scratch, it was only natural for me to take it the next level and dream up something crazy. I had this idea to deconstruct mushroom barley soup into a ravioli. I’d make barley ravioli, fill it with flanken and smother it in a velvetty wild mushroom sauce.


It was all a dream, until one day, a couple of weeks ago, my friend Melinda and I decided to plan a day of cooking together in my kitchen. Melinda is an adventurous cook who’s not afraid to try anything. She blogs about her kitchen experiments on kitchen-tested where she shares many of her fabulous recipes.


We were brainstorming about cooking ideas and I came back to the deconstructed mushroom barley ravioli that I had wanted to make for so long. Since Melinda is a big dessert person, we decided to do ravioli 2 ways. I would tackle the savory part of the meal while Melinda would do a dessert ravioli. Melinda is obsessed with s’mores so I wasn’t surprised when she came up with the idea to make a fried graham-cracker-crusted chocolate ravioli stuffed with chocolate and marshmallows.

Being the dedicated foodies/bloggers that we are, we decided that it would be fun to blog about our cooking experience and share the recipes while linking to each other’s posts. And so here we are.

One of the best parts of making this dish was getting to use my Le Creuset dutch oven for the first time! I had wanted the pricey pot since forever, I just couldn’t bring myself to splurge on it. Luckily, I won a $500 gift card to Williams Sonoma after winning 2nd place in The Mushroom Channel’s Swap It or Top It Contest for my portobello mushroom burger with sundried tomato aioli. As soon as my gift card came in the mail, I knew just what I would spend my winnings on! A dutch oven was #1 on my list, followed by a good quality electric knife sharpener.

The night before Melinda was to come, I sharpened up my knives with my new machine and went to work braising short ribs in my new dutch oven. I prepared the pasta dough in my food processor, following a recipe from Lidia Bastianich, the queen of Italian cooking. I couldn’t believe how easy it was to make the pasta dough! It came together in no time – exactly as Lidia had said.

Cooking day was finally here and we were beside ourselves with excitement. Melinda settled in to my kitchen and checked out my photography “studio” (aka the corner in my kid’s playroom). We started off our day with some s’mores coffee (an Archer Farms limited edition that I was saving for my s’mores-loving friend!) and got right down to ravioli-making. With my dough and meat already prepped, we rolled out the pasta dough and filled it with short ribs. While Melinda helped with the pasta, I got to work on the incredible wild mushroom sauce. It was so rich and flavorful, we could barely hold out while we photographed it. After sharing some shots with our fans on Instagram, we finally sat down to savor the fruits of our labor. The fresh barley pasta, paired with the shredded beef and velvetty mushroom sauce was truly reminiscent of mushroom barley soup. All in all: success!

Barley Ravioli with Short Ribs and Wild Mushroom Sauce

2 lbs. boneless flanken (short ribs)
1 tsp olive oil
s&p, to taste
1 leek, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 carrot, peeled and diced
2 celery stalks, diced
1 cup dry red wine (I used merlot)
6 sprigs thyme, divided
4 cups beef or chicken broth
2 large shallots, peeled and sliced
3 cloves garlic, minced
6 cups chopped assorted mushrooms (I used oyster, shitake and baby bella)
1 tbsp flour

Heat a dutch oven and drizzle with olive oil. Season flanken with salt & pepper and sear on both sides. Remove from the pot. Add leek, garlic, carrot and celery and saute (add more oil if needed) for several minutes. Deglaze the pan with wine. Return the meat to the pot and add 4 sprigs of thyme, broth, salt and pepper. Bring the mixture to a boil and place in the oven for 3 hours at 300 degrees.

When the flanken is ready, remove the meat from the pot and break it apart into shreds. Place a fine mesh sieve over a small pot or bowl and strain the cooking liquid through the sieve. Once the vegetables have been separated from the cooking liquid, remove the sprigs of thyme from the vegetables and mix the vegetables with the shredded flanken. If the mixture is dry, add up to 1/4 cup of the cooking liquid.

Take the remaining cooking liquid that you strained through the sieve and place it in the freezer (for about 20 minutes) so that the fat has a chance to congeal. Remove the fat and set the sauce aside.

In a saute pan, saute the shallots and garlic until fragrant. Add mushrooms and cook over high heat so that the liquid evaporates and the mushrooms caramelize. Add the flour and saute until golden. Add the reserved cooking liquid, 2 sprigs of thyme, salt and pepper and cook until thickened. If the mixture is too thick, thin it out with a bit of beef broth. If it is too thin, continue to cook until reduced and thickened.

Barley Ravioli
recipe from Lidia Bastianich

1⅓ cups all-purpose flour
⅔ cup barley flour
2 large eggs
¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil
3 tablespoons water

In a bowl, combine the eggs, oil and water and whisk to combine. Put both flours in a food processor fitted with a steel blade, and blend for a few seconds to aerate. While the food processor is running, pour the egg mixture through the feed tube. Process for about 30 seconds, until a dough forms and gathers on the blade. If the dough does not gather on the blade or process easily, it is too wet or dry. Feel the dough, then work in more flour or ice water, in small amounts, using the processor or kneading by hand. Turn the dough out on a lightly floured surface, and knead by hand for a minute, until it’s smooth, soft, and stretch.

Wrap the dough in plastic wrap and let stand for at least 30 minutes or overnight.

Divide the pasta dough into four parts and cover so that it doesn’t dry out. Working one at a time, roll the dough through a pasta machine into about 1/16″ thickness. Place rounded teaspoonfuls of flanken filling 1″ apart over half the sheet of pasta. Brush around the filling with water to moisten and fold the sheet over, pressing down to seal. Cut into squares with a ravioli press, pastry wheel or knife. Repeat with remaining dough and filling.

Bring a pot of salted water to a boil. Add ravioli and cook for about 2 minutes, until ravioli float to the top and are tender. Remove with a spider or slotted spoon and serve immediately with mushroom sauce.

NOTE: Since only a teaspoonful of filling is used in the ravioli, I had quite a bit of leftover shredded meat. It is so flavorful and delicious, I’m sure you won’t complain, but if you’d like, you can reduce the amount of flanken to 1 lb. so you don’t have much leftovers.

VARIATION: While I love the idea of making barley pasta dough with this recipe, you may use wonton wrappers, if you do not wish to make pasta dough from scratch.


Now that you’ve “sampled” my barley ravioli with wild mushroom sauce, it’s time for some dessert! Head on over to kitchen-tested for a step-by-step guide to making Melinda’s fried smore’s chocolate ravioli!


Here are some outtakes from our lunch together! I hope you had fun reading about our ravioli adventure!

Related recipes:

crockpot mushroom barley stoup
blended wild mushroom barley soup

Post a Comment

Pumpkin Pot Pie

I was lying in bed one night thinking about how I could take advantage of the adorable little pumpkins that are so bountiful this season (yes, these are the sort of things food bloggers think about when they go to bed at night). I knew I could make my own pumpkin puree, or carve out a spooky design (although I don’t celebrate Halloween), but I wanted MORE. Something fresh, and exciting, and oh yes – warm (have you seen the weather forecast lately?!).

I thought about real comfort food – you know, something I’d want to eat around a fireplace (if I had one) on a cold November night. And it came down to – you guessed it! – chicken pot pie. At first I thought about reinventing the chicken pot pie and making a vegetarian version with pumpkin and autumn spices. That got me thinking about all the winter pumpkins soups that are cleverly served inside the pumpkin – when I realized – I could have my pumpkin and chicken pot pie and eat it too!

This recipe combines the flavor of fresh-roasted pumpkin with creamy parsnips, carrots and mushrooms. It’s seasoned with fresh thyme and sage and topped off with flaky puff pastry for the perfect fall comfort food!

And would you look at the festive autumn design on these beauties? These pretty pumpkin packages (say that three times in a row!) are as good to look at as they are to eat. They’d make the perfect appetizer for your Thanksgiving meal!

Pumpkin Pot Pie

6 small sugar pumpkins
extra virgin olive oil
salt, pepper & allspice, to taste
1 medium onion, diced
2 tbsp olive oil
3 cloves garlic, minced
2 carrots, peeled and chopped
2 parsnips, peeled, cored, and chopped
1 container button mushrooms, sliced
1/4 cup flour
3 cups chicken stock
2 cups diced chicken (roasted, grilled, or leftover from your chicken soup)
2 tbsp fresh thyme
1 tbsp fresh sage (or 1 tsp dried)
s&p, to taste
1 pkg puff pastry, cut into squares (or 6 puff pastry squares, plus additional for decorating)
1 egg + 1 tbsp water, for eggwash

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Cut the tops off the sugar pumpkins and remove the seeds. Brush the insides of the pumpkins with olive oil and sprinkle with salt, pepper and allspice. Bake, flesh side down, until tender, about 30 minutes*.

Saute the onion in olive oil until golden and add garlic. Saute until fragrant. Add the carrots, parsnips and mushrooms and continue to saute until tender. Sprinkle flour over the vegetables and continue to saute for 2 minutes. Add the chicken stock and simmer until thickened. Stir in the diced chicken, thyme, sage, salt and pepper.  Ladle the filling into the pumpkins and cover with a square of puff pastry. Cut leaves out of extra puff pastry and glue it to the squares with egg. Brush the remaining puff pastry with egg and bake until golden, about 20 minutes.

*Don’t let the pumpkin get too soft or it will start to fall apart. You still want it to hold it’s shape (keep in mind that it will also be cooking for an additional 20 minutes when it’s covered in the puff pastry).

VARIATION: You may use turkey instead of chicken.

Related Recipes:

veal shepherd’s pie with celery root mashed potatoes
leftover turkey pot pie
chicken pot pie Passover croquettes

Post a Comment

Meat & Rice Stuffed Baby Eggplants

As we approach the last days of the holiday of Sukkot, I wanted to share a nontraditional “stuffed” recipe, for those looking for a change from traditional holipches/holishkes (stuffed cabbage). If you’ve always wondered why Hungarian style stuffed cabbage is served up on Sukkot, it’s because we want to celebrate the abundance of the harvest season. Fall is when farmers harvest their wheat in Israel, and stuffing vegetables with filling symbolizes their desire for a year of overflowing harvest. Although it is customary for many to eat stuffed cabbage, any stuffed recipe is well suited to honor this custom. You can stuff grape leaves, zucchini, peppers, or even fruit for dessert!

As I mentioned in this post, I was first introduced to the idea of mechshie when I married into a sephardic family. My mother in law taught me to prepare various dishes of meat & rice filled vegetables – each with it’s own unique flavor. Having grown up with these traditional Syrian dishes, my husband loves when I surprise him by making them. Although my twist on tomato & zucchini mechshie (which I’ve dubbed “mechshie ratatouille”) is my all time favorite, this lighter stuffed eggplant version is a close second.

If you want to go the traditional route, but you’re overwhelmed by the idea of making stuffed cabbage, try my Bubby’s cabbage soup with flanken. It tastes just like stuffed cabbage, without all the work! You can even leave out the flanken and make mini meat & rice balls instead.

Meat & Rice Stuffed Baby Eggplants

6-8 baby eggplants

Filling:
1 1/2 lb ground meat
2/3 c rice (I prefer basmati)
1/2 cup water
1 tsp allspice
kosher salt, to taste

Sauce:
3 cups water
juice of 1 lemon
1 head garlic, peeled
2 tbsp olive oil
kosher salt, to taste

Method:

To prepare the filling, combine the meat, rice, allspice, salt and water in a bowl and mix well to combine (I like to do this by hand, using gloves). Try to handle the meat gently, don’t squeeze it too much as this tends to toughen it up.

Slice the eggplants at both ends and core them using a paring knife (or a long vegetable corer, known as a ma’vdeh). Place all the pulp from the insides of the eggplants into a strainer and sprinkle generously with salt. Allow the pulp to rest for 20-30 minutes (this draws out the bitter liquid). Rinse the pulp with water to remove salt and add to the bottom of a wide saucepan.

Stuff the eggplants with the meat filling, taking care not to fill them too tightly as the rice will expand during cooking. Place them in the pot, sprinkling the garlic cloves all around. Drizzle the eggplants with olive oil, lemon juice and sprinkle with salt. Pour water into the pan, cover the pot and bring the liquid up to a boil over high heat. Lower the flame and simmer for 1-2 hours. For the last 30 minutes, uncover the pot and cook until the liquid reduces to a thick sauce.

NOTE: If you have leftover meat filling, roll it into small meatballs and place in the pot alongside the eggplant.

Related Recipes:

zucchini and tomato mechshie “ratatouille”
globe zucchini mechshie with tamarind and prunes

Post a Comment

Vegetarian Chili & Cornbread

For one week of the summer, I welcome the opportunity to put on my dairy apron, which usually collects dust until Shavuous comes around. Lighter meals of grilled fish and salads are also appreciated on these hot summer days. But for some serious meat eaters, the nine days* can be a challenging time. I know, because my husband is one of them. If he comes home from a long day of work to a pot of mac and cheese, he takes a bite and then asks for the next course. To him, a meal without meat is not a meal at all. The good news is, meat-eaters can still enjoy some hearty dishes, albeit without the 6-hour wait tag.

Vegetarian chili is a great option for the nine days because it is so versatile. You can serve it up in a burrito, over baked potatoes, or as a base for shepherds pie. You can also go the classic route and eat it alongside cornbread, or go Mexican with a tray of enchilada’s. Usually, chili needs to cook for several hours, but because I don’t like to sit over a hot stove in the summer, I’ve come up with a great recipe that doesn’t require endless hours on the stove.

For more great Nine Days ideas, including other meat-lovers recipes, visit the new Nine Days category.

You can also check out my new Nine Day Album on Facebook for great dairy and pareve recipes that are not on the blog.

*The Nine Days is a mourning period over the destruction of the Holy Temple. During this time, observant Jews abstain from eating meat and drinking wine as well as other joyous activities.

Vegetarian Chili

1 onion, diced
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 1/2 tbsp olive oil
1 jalapeno, finely chopped (seeds and veins removed)
2 tsp chili powder
1/2 tsp cumin
1 tsp garlic powder
3 heaping tbsp tomato paste
3 soft plum tomatoes, chopped
2 tbsp brown sugar
1 can kidney beans, drained and rinsed
1 can pinto or black beans, drained and rinsed
1 cup veggie stock or water
salt and pepper, to taste

Method:

Heat the olive oil in a pan and add onions and garlic. Saute until translucent. Add the jalapeno (keep some of the vein and/or seeds for more heat) and saute for another minute. Add the chili, cumin and garlic and continue to saute until fragrant. Add the tomato paste and saute for another 1-2 minutes. Add the remaining ingredients and bring to a simmer. Cook, covered, for 1 hour, stirring occasionally so that the chili doesn’t stick to the bottom of the pan. Add additional veggie stock, if needed.

To me, chili without cornbread is like a hot dog without mustard. It’s just a must-have! It took a long time for me to come up with the perfect cornbread recipe that is moist, not too sweet, and, well…corny (you know I mean that in the taste of corn sense). The combination of coconut milk and creamed corn keep the cornbread moist and pareve. That means you get to whip them up with some REAL meat chili when the Nine Days are up!

Moist Pareve Cornbread

1 1/2 cups flour
1 1/2 cups cornmeal
1/2 cup sugar
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup coconut milk (I use Coconut Dream Original)
1/2 cup canola oil
1 egg
1 14.75oz. can creamed corn

Method:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. In a bowl, whisk together the flour, cornmeal, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, & salt. In a separate bowl, whisk the milk, oil and egg. Pour the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients and stir to incorporate. Add the creamed corn and mix to combine. Pour into  a 9″ square pan, cast iron skillet, or 12 muffin cups. Bake for 20-25 minutes (less for the muffins, more for the pan) until a toothpick inserted comes out clean.

Cornbread may be kept at room temperature for up to 2 days and will keep for an additional week if refrigerated.

VARIATION: to make these dairy, substitute the coconut milk for whole milk and half of the oil for melted butter.

I mentioned lots of fun ways to use chili earlier in the post, but I especially love this one-dish-meal option. You can choose to layer the chili into a square baking dish, or serve them up in individual mason jars for a fun twist. Since the cornbread is cooked on top of the chili (and will rise during baking), I only use half of my cornbread recipe for it. You can use the remaining batter for cupcakes or double up the chili recipe, and make 2 pies.

Layered Chili Pie

1 recipe vegetarian chili
1 8oz. bag shredded cheddar cheese
1/2 recipe cornbread batter
1 scallion, chopped

Method:

Pour the chili into a 8″ square pyrex dish. Top with shredded cheddar. Mix the scallions into the cornbread batter and pour on top of the cheese. Bake, at 350 degrees, for 25 minutes. or until toothpick inserted comes out clean.

To prepare individual servings in mason jars, fill 1/3 of half pint jars with chili. Top with a tablespoon of cheddar cheese, and 1/3 cup cornbread batter mixed with scallions. Repeat with approximately 6-8 more jars. Bake at 350 (without the lid) for approximately 15-20 minutes, until toothpick inserted comes out clean.

1 year ago: Corn Flake crunch ice cream
2 years ago: sushi salad II

Post a Comment

Melt-In-Your-Mouth Veal Meatballs

I’m a huge fan of veal. It’s got a lovely flavor and that tender, melt in your mouth quality. It’s also much lighter than beef, so you don’t feel as heavy when you eat it. One of my favorite veal recipes is for these delicious meatballs. I don’t call ’em melt-in-your-mouth for nothing. They really do melt. in. your. mouth. While this recipe uses few ingredients, it’s chock full of flavor, mostly due to the bay leaves. They give the broth and meatballs a delicious flavor while imparting the most heavenly aroma. You’ll wanna make them just for the smell!

Having little kids, meatballs are definitely a staple in my house, but the plain old beef meatballs in marinara sauce does get kind of boring. My kids gobble these down like you can’t imagine. And yours will too!

Have you seen my veal shepherd’s pie with celery root mashed potatoes? It’s another great veal recipe that you must try!

Veal Meatballs

2 lbs. ground veal
2 eggs
1/3 cup plain breadcrumbs
salt and pepper, to taste
1 large onion, diced
1 tbsp olive oil
4 cups water
5 bay leaves
1/2 cup brown sugar
salt and pepper, to taste

Method:

In a bowl, combine the veal, eggs, breadcrumbs, salt and pepper. Form the mixture into balls. In the meantime, saute the onion in olive oil until deeply golden and caramelized. Add the water, sugar, bay leaves, salt and pepper and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat to a simmer and add meatballs. Simmer, covered, for 1-2 hours.

If you wish to thicken the cooking liquid, you may continue to cook it over high heat until reduced to desired consistency.

1 year ago: wild mushroom barley soup
Post a Comment