Goat Cheese Pasta

One of our current favourites for dinner at the moment is pasta with an amazing goat’s cheese sauce.  The flavours are unbelievable!  We always make sure we use a quality cheese and you can’t go past the Meredith Diary Goat Cheese.  You can eat it on its own with some crackers or add it to your cooking as it’s packaged with olive oil, peppercorns, garlic and herbs.  Just amazing!

To make this dish, we firstly get the pasta out of the way and ready to cook.  We like to make fettuccine-sized pasta for this recipe.  Once that’s done, we brown some onion and start cooking the chicken.  The sauce is made with the goat’s cheese and some cream, plus we add in some favourite herbs such as basil.  Once that’s all going, we sometimes add some pitted olives and then right at the end, some halved cherry tomatoes.  Cook the pasta for a few minutes until al dente and stir through the sauce!
Delicious!

Spinach and Ricotta Cannelloni

We have always wanted to try making cannelloni but weren’t sure exactly how to do it or what ingredients to use.  While at the supermarket one day, we found pre-made cannelloni’s which just required to be filled with whatever filling you wanted!  Since we love spinach and ricotta ravioli, we thought we would start with that.  It was so easy to do and very delicious!  We’re definitely going to try making our own pasta next time which would make it even better.  We’ve poured a tomato pasta sauce over the top and added some extra grated cheese.

Homemade Pasta – Spinich & Ricotta Ravioli & Fettuccine

About four months ago, maybe more, we decided to buy our first pasta maker… but it’s taken this long until we’ve actually been motivated enough to use it.  Not that we thought it would be terribly time-consuming and difficult, but I guess we haven’t thought of actually getting in and testing it out!  After watching it done so many times on MasterChef, we really wanted to see how good fresh pasta was.
It turns out, it’s actually heaps of fun to use and quite easy once you get the hang of it.  Plus, it’s true when people say that once you taste fresh pasta, you’ll never want to go back to the packaged variety!

We just used a basic recipe for this first time which we found at: http://www.taste.com.au/recipes/12460/basic+fresh+pasta
There’s also suggestions for other things you can add to it to make different variations – beetroot pasta, fresh pesto pasta, spinach pasta, saffron pasta… I’m sure you could basically try anything!

Once we had made the pasta sheets, we cut out circles using a cutter as we were making half ravioli, half fettuccine.
For the ravioli, we mixed in a bowl some chopped spinach leaves and ricotta.  Once the circles were cut in the pasta, we put a dollop of the spinach mixture into the middle, put a light layer of whisked egg around the outside of the pasta circle and then put a second piece of pasta on top, closing it up properly by using a fork around the outside.
The fettuccine was easy as there’s an attachment with our pasta maker.  Once we’d made a pasta sheet, we just put it through the attachment and we had fettuccine!
For cooking it, we had a boiling pot of water with some salt added and it probably took about 8 mins for the ravioli and a bit less for the fettuccine.  It was all trial and error though – we kept testing it until we were happy with it!

We served it with a semi-dried tomato sauce and some of the spinach and ricotta mixture on top.  Delish!!

Please see the photo gallery for the whole process!

Chicken & Mushroom Pasta

Chicken and Mushroom Pasta

Poppit – Like most people, we have a few favourite dishes which are often making an appearance on our dinner plates.  This easy but delicious meal is that type of dish for us – we just love it!
As I try to avoid gluten as much as possible due to being intolerant to it, this is an especially versatile dish as I can cook two batches of pasta – one gluten-free and one normal.  I would just use gluten-free but someone (nudging Puppet) prefers the normal pasta.  Fair enough, and it’s so easy that I don’t mind.  Plus it means we always have enough for dinner the next night too.  Tasty, simple and economical!

We like the veggies to be quite chunky but they can be cut however you prefer.  As we’re also huge chilli fans, we always serve with a couple of chillies on the side for some extra bite!  This is definitely optional, it’s perfectly fine without the chillies, we’re just seriously crazy about them!

Also, if you are actually celiac and can’t have gluten at all, you’d have to make your own sauce as most of the bottled varieties contain a thickener.  This doesn’t bother me personally though as I’m only intolerant to the gluten.

Ingredients:
– Pasta (we use both gluten-free and normal, cooked separately, of course)
– Bottled pasta sauce (I like to use either an Alfredo-type sauce or a mushroom white pasta sauce)
– Red capsicum (chopped into pieces)
– Broccoli (chopped into pieces)
– 1 brown onion (sliced finely)
– Olive oil
– Chicken breasts (1 per person, cut into smallish cubes)
– Mushrooms (chopped into slices)
– Spring onion (sliced thinly)

Method:
1.  Boil the water for the pasta and start cooking.
2.  Heat the saucepan with a bit of olive oil and cook the onion until starting to go clear and soft.
3.  Cook the chicken pieces then add the pasta sauce.
4. Add the broccoli, capsicum and mushrooms, stir until all mixed in and put lid on to leave to cook for about 5-10mins.
5.  When the pasta is cooked, drain and rinse.
6.  When the veggies and sauce mix is cooked, add the spring onion and stir in.
7.  Add the sauce to the pasta (both lots if you’re also doing gluten-free) and stir in.
8.  Serve with parmesan cheese and fresh chillies (optional).

With the regular pasta:

The super-hot chillies!

 

With the gluten-free pasta

Duck Breasts with Fig Sauce and Cracked Pepper Pasta

Poppit’s Creative Cooking – Thursday Night

Poppit – For my cooking night this week, I wanted to make something completely new that I have never tried before.  Considering I had only ever tasted duck meat once before when we were out at a very nice restaurant, I thought I would give it a go!  I went to a wonderful local butcher who stocks all kinds of meats and found duck breasts.  Be warned, the price does look a little pricey, mine was $19.95, but when considering how much you can spend on other meats and seafood, I figured this was pretty good (especially when tasting the final product!).
This was such an easy meal to make but the overall flavours were just amazing.  Puppet agreed that it tasted like something we would choose at one of our favourite fancy restaurants.

Main Course

Duck Breasts with Fig Sauce and Cracked Pepper Pasta

Ingredients:
– 2 duck breast fillets
– 2 sprigs of rosemary
– 2 bay leaves
– Pasta (I used gluten-free cracked pepper pasta found at my local speciality deli)
– 20g butter
– 100g baby spinach leaves
– 1 small brown onion (chopped finely)
– 3 dried figs, quartered (I used ‘turkish figs’ found at my local deli – I believe they were dried and salted)
– 1 cup port
– 1 cup chicken stock
– 20g butter
– Asparagus (steamed either in pot or microwave)

Method:
1.  Pre-heat oven to 210°C (less for fan-forced) 
2.  Make a pocket between the duck meat and the skin, insert one sprig of rosemary and one bay leaf into each. 
3.  Score the skin side of the duck and season with salt and pepper.
4.  Heat frypan and when hot, place duck breasts skin side down on pan and cook for 3 mins (or until browning), turn over and cook for another minute or so.  Beware of the fat from the duck – it spits everywhere!
5.  Remove from pan and place in oven tray.  Cook for 10 mins in oven (or until as prefered).
6.  Meanwhile, cook pasta and sauce.
7.  Cook onion in same frypan and stir until soft.
8.  Add figs, port and stock – bring to the boil.
9.  Reduce heat and simmer for 5 minutes then add extra butter and stir until thickened. (Optional – I added some cornflour that I had already mixed with 1 tbs of water for extra thickness)
10.  Remove duck breasts from oven tray and rest for 5 mins.
11.  When pasta is cooking, mix with spinach leaves and butter.
12.  Serve with asparagus and with fig sauce poured over the top.