Pasta – Page 3 – Busy in Brooklyn

Leah Schapira & Victoria Dwek turn out new cookbooks faster than I develop recipes. Their latest addition to the Made Easy series is a fantastic collection of dairy recipes, just in time for Shavuot!

Like Starters & Sides Made Easy, Passover Made Easy, and Kids Cooking Made Easy, the Dairy edition is layed out in the same attractive, easy-to-read style. Even their cookbook-making skills seem made easy. They’ve mastered a template that provides a small soft-cover book that’s beautifully styled, easy to flip through, and filled with tips and tidbits, all without seeming overwhelming. The beautiful pictures draw you in and the down-to-earth recipes make you want to open your pantry right then-and-there to whip up one of their quick and easy dishes.

Besides for 60 easy-to-make recipes, you’ll also find a comprehensive cheese guide, a Make It Light section, a Make it Pareve Guide, and bonus serving ideas. Leah and Victoria fill each page with great tips, like how to measure frozen fruit, how to soften butter quickly or how to bake pizza without a pizza stone. They also share their thought processes and family anecdotes in a fun and friendly way.

What do I not want to make from this cookbook? It’s filled with mouthwatering recipes for breakfast, great starters & sides, soups, salads & sandwiches, and of course pizza, pasta and dessert (hello 180 calorie cheesecake!).

Some of the recipes I look forward to trying are the granola thins, arancini, sweet chili home fries, stuffed sole, French mushroom soup, hasselback baguette, honey pomodoro pizza, cajun creamy penne, cheese buns, peanut butter creme brulee and strawberry cheesecake ice cream.

In honor of the upcoming holiday of Shavuot, I’m giving away a free copy of the Dairy Made Easy cookbook! To enter, simply leave a comment below with your favorite Shavuot dish. You can also follow Busy In Brooklyn via any of the channels below for an extra entry. Just be sure to leave a note in the comment letting me know where you follow.

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Giveaway is open to U.S. residents only. Winner will be chosen at random at 10:00 AM EST on Monday, May 26th, 2014.

Baked Roasted Veggie Pasta

from Dairy Made Easy by Leah Schapira and Victoria Dwek
Reprinted with permission from the copyright holders: ArtScroll/Mesorah Publications
http://www.artscroll.com/Products/DMEP.html

8 servings

INGREDIENTS

1 lb fusilli or penne pasta
2 pints cherry tomatoes, halved
2 red onions, cut into wedges
1 zucchini, cut into half moons
¼ cup olive oil
½ tsp garlic powder
kosher salt, to taste
coarse black pepper, to taste
6 oz feta cheese, crumbled
1 Tbsp chopped fresh or frozen basil

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Prepare pasta according to package directions.
2. Preheat oven to 400°F. In a 9 x 13-inch pan, combine cherry tomatoes, red onions, and zucchini. Toss with olive oil and garlic powder. Bake for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally.
3. Add pasta to vegetables and mix well. Season with salt and pepper.
4. Preheat oven to broil and broil for 10 minutes, stirring after 5 minutes.
5. Add feta cheese and basil; stir to combine (the heat will melt the cheese). Serve hot or at room temperature.

Tips:

-You can add more veggies to the mix. We also love this pasta with red peppers instead of tomatoes.
-We made the pasta in this photo using broken lasagna sheets.

Sour Cream Chocolate Chip Cake

from Dairy Made Easy by Leah Schapira and Victoria Dwek
Reprinted with permission from the copyright holders: ArtScroll/Mesorah Publications
http://www.artscroll.com/Products/DMEP.html

12 servings

Batter:

1 cup sour cream
1 tsp baking soda
½ cup (1 stick) butter
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp almond extract
2 cups flour
1 tsp baking powder

Chocolate Nut Mixture:

1 (10oz) bag chocolate chips
2 cups coarsely chopped walnuts
1 tsp cinnamon
¼ cup sugar

1. Preheat oven to 350°F. Grease a 10inch tube pan.
2. In a medium bowl, combine sour cream and baking soda.
Sour cream should bubble and expand. Set aside.
3. In the bowl of an electric mixer, combine butter and sugar.
Beat until light and creamy. Add eggs and extracts.
4. Add half the flour and baking powder. Add sour cream mixture,
then remaining flour. Beat until just combined. Do not overmix.
5. In a medium bowl, combine chocolate chips, walnuts,
cinnamon, and sugar. Sprinkle some of the chocolate nut mixture into the pan. Add half the batter over it, then half of the remaining chocolate nut mixture. Add remaining batter and top cake with remaining chocolate nut mixture. Bake for 50-60 minutes, until top is firm and crispy. Let cool for 10 minutes before removing from pan.

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Spinach Meat Lasagna Roll-Ups

On April 30, 2014May 2, 2014

by chanie

in Appetizer, Dinner, Lunch, Meat & Poultry, Pasta, Recipes

15 Comments

It’s funny how you never quite know which of your recipes is gonna go viral. Sometimes, I get so excited about my crazy mash-up ideas, that I think the whole world will too. But I’m not always right. Like here and here. No biggie.

It’s when I least expect it that people go gaga over my food. Like here and here. You can be minding your own blogger business when before you know it, the recipe’s been repinned hundreds, or even thousands, of times. My spinach lasagna roll-ups is one such recipe, and when I noticed all the love it was getting, I decided I had to share my meat version.

You see, being kosher, I do not eat milk and meat together, so bechamel-smothered-meat-lasgana is out of the question. We kosher-keepers eat our lasagna either meat, or dairy, not both. Of course you can always make dairy lasagna with soy crumbles, or meat lasagna with vegan cheese, but I’m just not one for the fake stuff. It’s either got real meat, or real cheese, no soy for me!

So, without further adieu, I give you the meat version of my dairy lasagna roll-ups. Let me know which ones you like better!

Meat Lasagna Roll-Ups

approximately 14 lasagna sheets
1 medium onion, chopped
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 1/2 tbsp olive oil
2 lbs. ground beef
1 10 oz. box frozen chopped spinach, thawed and squeezed to remove water
2 15 oz. cans tomato sauce
12 oz. tomato paste
2 tbsp sugar
1 tsp basil
1 tsp oregano
1 tsp garlic powder
salt and pepper, to taste
juice of 1/2 lemon

Method:

Cook lasagna noodles according to package directions. Drain and lay the noodles onto parchment paper or aluminum foil (so that they don’t stick together).

Saute onion and garlic in oil until translucent. Add meat and saute until no longer pink. Drain, if necessary.

Mix tomato sauce, paste, spices, spinach and lemon juice. Reserve 1 cup. Add remaining tomato mixture to the meat and cook over low heat for 15 minutes, stirring occasionally. Taste and adjust seasoning, if necessary.

Spread the meat mixture onto the lasagna sheets and roll up. Brush the lasagna rolls with the reserved tomato sauce.

Pour 1/4 cup of water into the bottom of the pan. Bake, covered, at 350 degrees until heated through, about 20 minutes.

Related Recipes:

dairy spinach lasagna roll-ups

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Roundup: The Seven Species

On January 13, 2014January 13, 2014

by chanie

in Appetizer, Breakfast, Brunch, Cakes, Cookies, Dairy, Dessert, Dinner, Dips, Fish, Fruit, Lunch, Main Dish, Meat & Poultry, Muffins, Pasta, Pies, Recipes, Salad, Side Dish, Snacks

15 Comments

This Thursday, Jews around the world will celebrate Tu B’shvat, the New Year for the trees. Traditionally, we celebrate by eating The Sheva Minim, or, Seven Species. They include the following fruits and grains that are native to the land of Israel: wheat, barley, grapes, figs, pomegranates, olives and dates.

In honor of Tu B’shvat, I’ve put together a roundup of recipes for each of the Seven Species from all around the web. Enjoy!

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Mushroom Barley & Short Rib Ravioli

On December 29, 2013December 30, 2013

by chanie

in Dinner, Main Dish, Meat & Poultry, Pasta, Recipes

16 Comments

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!

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Linguini Lasagna

On July 23, 2012July 8, 2013

by chanie

in Dairy, Dinner, Lunch, Main Dish, Pasta, Recipes, Shavuous, The Nine Days

20 Comments

With the nine days* upon us, we’re all looking for a quick fix dairy dinner that doesn’t require oven time. At least here in Brooklyn, where the weather has been stifling hot and humid. A nice big salad would make for the perfect meal, but I’ve got kids to feed, and salad is just not gonna cut it. My kids adore lasagna, but all that prep and cooking time is too much on these long summer days. My solution? a one-pot pasta dinner with all the lasagna components. The best part is, you can customize it to include all your favorite lasagna fillings. I knew I did well when I served this up and my daughter’s first words were “this tastes like Bubby’s lasagna!” Use store-bought marinara to save on prep time, or prepare your own original recipe.

What recipes are you serving up during the Nine Days? On my menu this week:

Monday: baked ziti and greek salad
Tuesday: crispy beer battered fish tacos from The Shiksa
Wednesday: light eggplant parmesan (no breading)
Thursday: quesadillas with assorted fillings

For more great Nine Days menu ideas, check out last years post.

*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.

Linguini Lasagna

1 box linguini pasta, cooked al dente (see package instructions)
2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
3 cloves garlic, minced
1-2 cups chopped spinach (if frozen, thaw and squeeze out water)
salt and pepper, to taste
1 jar marinara sauce
1/2 tsp oregano
1/2 tsp basil
1 tsp sugar, optional
1 8oz. container cottage cheese
1 cup shredded mozzarella cheese

Method:

Heat up oil in a skillet and add garlic. Saute until fragrant, but not browned. Add spinach and saute for a few minutes. Season with salt and pepper. Add marinara sauce, basil, oregano and sugar and bring to a boil. With tongs, toss the linguini into the sauce and stir in cottage cheese and mozzarella. Serve immediately.

Variation: For a fun twist on traditional lasagna, break a few lasagna sheets into pieces. Cook until al dente. Use in place of linguini and mix with remaining ingredients.

1 year ago: spinach stuffed mushrooms

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Busy in Brooklyn

Category: Pasta

Dairy Made Easy Cookbook Review & Giveaway

Spinach Meat Lasagna Roll-Ups

Roundup: The Seven Species

Mushroom Barley & Short Rib Ravioli

Linguini Lasagna