So sue me, I've been in a cooking mood, over a computering mood. For the past two
days, I've been coming back from work, putting on a good dvd, and then puttering
around with some kind of recipe. Much to familial consternation when they find flour on
the tv remote, but hem, can't make pies without breaking a few eggs or dusting flour
around. :P
To the strains of the last episodes of Charmed season 4, I have been trying out handmade
tortelli stuffed with ricotta cheese. I blame www.tigerandstrawberries.com. The blogging
cook there, Barbara Fischer, does rather amazing things with a wide culinary and cultural
repetoire (though I have to comment that her Chinese food is not as kewl as she seems to
think it is - I'm sure it's very wholesome western pseudo-chinese stir fry with real(TM)
Chinese ingredients, but I've never seen stir-fry or pau look like /that/ before. That's not
beef stir fry, that's tenderloin steak stir-fry. :P And where the heck is your sauce
anyhow.)
Anyhow, I saw her tortellini recipe. Frankly, I think her photo skills suck. (Her
southwestern and mexican stuff look good though. Unfamiliarity makes it look good, I
guess.) It looked kinda gruesomely homemade, but the good news was that I kept
thinking: gosh darn, if she can make tortellini that ends up looking more like wantonelli, I
bet I can do it too.
And the image of it smothered in tomato sauce kept drifting around in my head
relentlessly.
I have this funny thing about pasta. I hate eating out for pasta. I keep thinking that it's so
bloody simple it can be made at home for half the price and double the quality.
In Singapore, it's a very simple equation. Either the pasta is cheap and pure crap -
overboiled pasta from a packet, some pre-factory made sauce glopped on top, and if
you're very lucky, some crumbs of minced meat or factory-produced sausage again. And
this they charge 5 bucks for?! Oi, I can do better at home. For sure.
Or the pasta is overpriced and either mediocre crap again, or tastes good but is just
exceedingly overpriced.
Pasta fresca. Fresh pasta. That's a plus. Factory made though - can't win 'em all. Sauce
is cooked by a cook who at least has the basics of cream and tomato sauces down.
Generous helping. But well, it's just passable to my taste buds, and kinda overpriced for
the quality, imo. Again, I can make this level of pasta at home.
As I proved very early on when I actually followed an egg pasta recipe book, rolled out
my own strips of fresh pasta, boiled them, and then made the best carbonara sauce ever -
real eggs and cream freshly stirred in, formed the most sinful thing in the world.
Followed very closely by the best mushroom sauce ever - fresh mushrooms, a generous
helping of butter (frying stuff in butter is a surefire way of making stuff taste fantastic
and burst your coronary arteries at the same time), salt and then cream again for the
sauce.
I've had good pasta made by small little Italian restaurants, but they charge $30+ easy for
a measly four largish-sized fresh tortellini stuffed with expensive cheeses. Again, it's not
worth it! *twitch*
So anyhow, I just had to make tortellini myself. I was minus any eggs, and I was worried
about the cholestrol anyhow. So normal pasta it was going to be. Enter flour. Enter water.
Enter worried brooding about how plain the recipe seemed to be. Enter kitchen and a
desperate grab at the spice rack - and dried basil went flying into the flour.
Yea yea, I know fresh herbs rule. If I had a Cold Storage downstairs from my house, I
would probably burn a hole in my wallet everytime I got the hankering to make real food.
Unfortunately, there's only an NTUC downstairs and I doubted they had real basil, so I
went with what existed in the rather bare kitchen.
Made the dough, and started patting out flat shapes with my hand and stuffing ricotta into
them. Things got very large sized and leaky and out of hand in a hurry. Nevermind, first
time for everything. When I started to boil them, I decided that the ricotta oozing out was
too good to be wasted, so I trashed the idea of a tomato sauce and went with a soup base
instead. Being lazy by this time, I cleaned out the barren kitchen, emptying a Chunky
Campbell's Chicken Vegetable soup into it, and whacked some tomato paste in.
So I had Dumplinglini in Tomato Veggie soup for dinner. Educational experience, tasted
nice, even if it didn't look too good.
On the very next day, I was game for take 2. Real tortellini.
I found a hand roller that looked like it could roll out dough properly flat.
Then to the funky strains of Mirrormask, I started making 'proper' tortellini. That is, if
tortellini dough comprises of flour, turmeric and instant garlic potato mash. Hee. I was
rummaging around for something different other than dried 'herbs' and that was the only
thing left in the kitchen. Hey, if potato gnocchi is made with potato and flour, then well,
potato tortellini should be ok. :P
The roller helped a ton. Managed to get it almost as flat as a wonton skin. Maybe the
thickness of two stacked together. Then proceeded to stuff it with ricotta again. Very
enjoyable, very 'zen' and by the way, Neil Gaiman's & Dave McKean's Mirrormask
rules.
At first I thought I wouldn't enjoy it because it seemed too surreal. Dave McKean has a
very distinctive style of art, and it didn't appear appropriate for film. I caught a sneak
peek of the film when Neil Gaiman was in town and showing it off, it was a technically
perfect enough piece, where the protagonist is surrounded by weird jack in the boxes and
undergoing some kind of transformation. But it was very disjointed when separated from
its context, so I wasn't too impressed.
Fortunately, Gaiman's story is powerful enough that when I started watching the dvd
properly, from introduction onwards, I knew it was going to be good and everything
would fit into place. Gaiman has a knack of starting the reader/viewer off in a slightly
unfamiliar but still very real-world setting, letting them get their feet wet in the world,
and then pulling the rug from under their feet and showing them there's a much stranger,
magical, fantastical universe than they expect.
When you're grounded this way and then slowly introduced into the brave new world,
your acceptance of the fantastical expands and expands until disbelief suspends enough to
allow that previously described 'transformation' scene to take place.
Good show. Can't mention more without spoiling it. Must-watch. Especially for Gaiman
fans.
Oh, and I ended up with about 30-35 tortellini. Made myself a nice tomato sauce, and
drizzled cheese on top. Was great too.
No comments:
Post a Comment