Butternut squash gnocchi with roast garlic, burnt butter and crispy sage

#butternutsquash #gnocchi with #burntbutter and crispy sage with a bit of #pecorino

A photo posted by Lara Beans (@beanslala) on Nov 12, 2016 at 1:52pm PST

This was a really lovely easy recipe to make!  I’ve adapted it from Daniel Ottolenghi’srecipe for gnocchi in today’s guardian, using what I had at home to make the sauce plus my love of sage with butternut is no secret! 

I have a lot of butternut at the moment. And i mean a lot! I‘ve been cooking it in roasts and stews and salads, and still they keep on piling up.  I get at least 1 with every veggie delivery! I was looking for something new to make, and I’ve been thinking about gnocchi so when the recipe came up today, I thought, why not?

This recipe can be easily multiplied.  You can also make the gnocchi in batches ahead of time – simply freeze on the tray after shaping into individual gnocchi, then place in freezer bags in whatever size portion you want).  I’m definitely going to make a couple of night’s worth of portions, this recipe is easy enough as it is, but to have the veggies roasted and the gnocchi prepared beforehand means dinner could be on the table on a weeknight in the time it takes to make the burnt butter sauce! J  These little pillows of happiness are softer and definitely tastier than ready-made ones you get at the shops – and as an added bonus, you feel like a total “nonna” making these and pushing each one down on a fork!  I look forward to making these with my nieces, they will love it!

Butternut squash gnocchi with roast garlic, burnt butter and crispy sage

Wild Asparagus and Greens Pasta (Wild, Natural foods take 2)

Springtime is a great time for foraging in Malta.  There are plenty of delicious and healthy options to find just on your weekend walk in the countryside (and sometimes, even just walking around residential areas!)

Happy Spaghetti sauce :)

Spaghetti with Artichokes and Tuna (Carciofi e Tonno)

You can choose to make this sauce with the flesh from leftover stuffed artichokes, or plain boiled artichokes, or artichoke flesh collected when in season and frozen; For more information about this, please see the previous post (or click here!)

Depending on whether you use plain or not will make a difference to the sauce.  I always add a bit of extra garlic, fresh garlic stems when in season.

This really is a sauce that you can adapt to whatever you fancy, but I'll give you the recipe of what I did this time, with some additional notes as I go along.  :)

I used leftover stuffed globe artichokes, which were simmered with plenty of fresh flat leaf parsley and fresh garlic (click this for a link to what i mean by fresh garlic).  If i had used plain simmered artichokes, I would have added a bunch more parsley and garlic.

Salsa Cruda - a.k.a bloody simple pasta sauce!

Salsa Cruda literally means "raw sauce", as this sauce requires no cooking at all.  There are so many variations of this, but essentially there are a few things in common with all of them: fresh tomatoes, olive oil, a summery herb, all at room temperature.  The pasta is added steaming hot, making a lovely contrast with the cool sauce. Drizzle with some extra Extra Virgin Olive oil just before serving :)

Everything about this sauce screams summer - invokes the feelings of al fresco dining, relaxation, possibly with a frosty glass of white wine :)

The most important thing in this sauce is that you buy the right quality ingredients.   I adore tomatoes for example, but I will not buy them unless they are EXACTLY the quality I want.  Same goes with everything else in this sauce.  Except the basil, because that's growing in pots all over our coutyard in an attempt to finally have enough basil to see us through summer (I swear we're all basil addicts here, I even use it on toast with a tiny drizzle of olive oil and a sprinkle of seasoning in the morning, it's not my fault, I walk past 2 basil plants on the way to the kitchen, I can't help but pick a leaf or 2!) 

simple, quick, easy, fresh.  :D

Cheesy vegetable Lasagne

We stuff ourselves silly on Xmas day.  It's ridiculous.  And now that the "kids" have become foodies, we have added, not reduced the amount of courses served at this mammoth, 8 hour lunch.  Every time one of the "traditional" family dishes is threatened, half the family go up-in-arms about it, so it's a bit of a risk to change the staples.  In our family these staples are meat lasagne, and a dessert we call "coffee mousse", which I'm yet to attempt.

I did the daring and changed the meat lasagne into a vegetarian version, in an attempt to at least make one of the courses somewhat easier to digest with all the other foods there.  As not to scare the carnivores, we named it "cheesy vegetable lasagne", with an emphasis on the cheese.  And it seemed to work! 

Cheesy vegetable lasagne

baked potato gnocchi with mixed mushrooms

Jamie and I went to Amsterdam a few weeks ago, and rented a little apartment to stay in.  Great idea, as we could use ingredients we don't find so often in cooking :D

Headed off to the stoopermarket and found a variety of mushrooms, so thought we'd make something with them.  I really felt like potato something, and gnocchi sprung to mind <3

And so was the birth of the baked gnocchi mushroom dish :)

The finished product. melty, golden mushroomy potato goodness.

Lala's lasagne

This recipe is pretty much my mum's recipe.. although we always manage to make it taste completely different.  To be honest mine tastes different every time. but i must say, I do like my own (and my family's) lasagne.  There are a few other people's lasagne dishes I've enjoyed, I can literally count them on 1 hand (my Uncle Kiki's, and my Aunt Isabel's, and my best friend's mum Pat).  I'm sure there are plenty of delicious lasagnas out there but i haven't had the pleasure, and frankly, I don't even really want to try cos there's not much I abhor tasting more than a bad lasagne. 

anyway here goes:

Spinach and Ricotta Canneloni

Canneloni is a baked pasta dish that i love doing, now that i've found how easy it is piping the filling into the pasta tubes, rather than trying to spoon it in :P  Love my practical mate and old housemate Becky, who walked past the kitchen once when I was making them and just said "why don't you use a bag to pipe it in?".... :D

Spaghetti with olive oil, garlic, herbs and ricotta

This is one of those simple sauces that i love! When we started making it, it was going to be an "olio aglio" but found a small amount of ricotta in the fridge so in it went, along with some of the basil we have growing in the courtyard :)

So simple, so good! :)

Pasta with Eggplant and tomato sauce

As far as saucy pasta sauces go, this has got to be one of my absolute favourites :)  It's quite similar to Pasta a la Norma, but this version has no Chilli and we use whatever cheese we have available, not specifically Ricotta Salata.  Eggplant is known as Aubergines in many places, which is the French word for them.

Ghagin Tork jew Griek ("turkish" or "greek" pasta, but it's actually Maltese!)

I have no clue as to whether this pasta sauce originates from Turkey, Greece, or anywhere else but Malta, but all I know is that it's absolutely divine, and So ridiculously easy.  You will need at 1.5-2 hours of simmering, so this is not something you make when you're starving after work :)

i love the simple look of this sauce, and the meat is literally melt in your mouth!

10 minute pasta - Artichoke hearts

I'm a huge fan of making Pasta sauces that take just about as long as it does for the water to boil and pasta to cook.  Pasta dishes like this are definitely my "2 minute noodle" or "cheese toastie dinner" type meals.. I don't really like to eat take-away, and am not a huge fan of ready meals (unless they were ones that I prepared, at least partially).

You can serve with grated parmesan or (as in this case) shaved bottarga!

This sauce falls under this category.

baby balls of meat

Today and yesterday I took on the task of sorting through everything we had in the fridge and freezer, throwing out expired stuff, and arranging the rest so that it's easily accessible and ready to be used in time for it to still be good.

Sorting out the freezer was interesting, have found lovely packets of fresh artichoke hearts that my dad lovingly prepared when it was artichoke season, some delicious looking pumpkin ravioli, amongst so much other stuff like desserts, meat, veggies and a heap of ready chopped garlic and ginger :D very handy to know :D

I took out 500 grams of pork mince, as i had an idea brewing when I'd cleaned the fridge yesterday and found some pork stock (leftover from a roast this weekend - recipe to follow!) and leftover 10 minute pasta sauce (well, my dad's version of). Plenty of the other ingredients are also leftover, or bits that were found in the freezer that i thought would be nice to add.

Papardelle with Mixed Forest Mushrooms

Wow... Sister's wedding is over, and life has started to resemble normality once again. Yesterday decided to have some of the ladies over, to relieve them from cooking duties on a Monday after work. I know I'd love it if people did that to me on Mondays :)

After agonising at what to feed them, I decided that our freezer (yet again!) is really full, so wanted to use something out of there. I found 2 packets of mushrooms - one was only porcini, the other was mixed forest mushrooms. We also have some truffle oil that we never get to use so I thought this would go smashingly with it! Opened the cupboard, and Voila! Papardelle Al Ouvo! (egg pasta!) even better! And so a dish was made:

A bolognese/ragu based sauce for spaghetti (and baked rice the next day!)

Just like many people, bolognese sauce reminds me of being a kid, it's still the ultimate comfort food dinner for me. It instantly sends me back to being little, with my sister and 3 or 4 cousins, and mum and/or one of my aunts serving up steaming spaghetti loaded with sauce and cheese. Learning how to eat spaghetti with just a fork was like graduating, I remember the pride I felt when mum stopped cutting up the spaghetti because I'd learnt to twirl it deftly around my fork without dropping the pasta everywhere :)

Bolognese is also what started my cooking adventures apparently. At the age of 3, I was at my Aunt's house, and she was making bolognese. I looked at her in shock at one point, and started telling her that "my mummy makes it like this" and went on to explain what she was doing "wrong" and how she should make it. Needless to say she was very amused, and reminds me of this often hehehe...

The recipe I'm about to give is by no means a traditional bolognese. Apparently the original bolognese doesn't even have tomatoes or garlic in it, and uses heaps of milk and even funghi porcini! So I suppose a "ragu" or "meat based pasta sauce" is the better term.

Fettucini with Bottarga, artichoke hearts and grouper

I went to Rome at the start of June this year, and apart from friends and sightseeing, of course food was a huge part of it! :)

Went out one night to Via del Portico d'Ottavia, to a Kosher restaurant in the old Jewish Ghetto. Their speciality is fried things, and our starters were amazing!

Had zucchini flowers filled with fish, in batter, as well as other random and delicious fried veggies... nom!

My main course was fish (grouper) and zucchini flower pasta, however someone else had egg pasta with artichoke hearts and bottarga.. and it sounded amazing! Inspired by this, I thought i'd make egg pasta with grouper, bottarga and artichoke hearts (The artichoke hearts were lovingly collected by my parents when they were in season, then frozen in batches to make awesome pasta and risotto - respek!)

Found some nice fresh grouper steaks - 2 were plenty for a pasta dish for 4 - they are a little pricey and really you can use any nice white fish, but Grouper (or Cerna in Maltese) is awesome. so milky and delicious! :D

must say, it did look better before i stirred it in.  but the taste was sublime!

Fenkata!

Ok - For all the non-Malteasers out there - Fenkata can be translated to a meal (with a large group of people) where Rabbit is consumed in large quantities, mostly out. Only in Maltese could one have a word for something like that :)

From what I know, the origins of the Fenkata was that the Maltese were not allowed to eat rabbits when the knights ruled the island, whilst the knights used to hunt them and eat them at will. They were allowed to during "Imnajra" (more info on that awesomely bizarre feast here) though, and they used to make the most of it. I like to think that it was our Maltese "what? you say we can't have it? well screw you! we're not only going to have it but it will be a Maltese tradition from now on" attitude that gave birth to such a tradition :D

There were a few steps I took before the fenkata;
- Ordered 2 rabbits from a good farmer, we have one living 3 doors away so that was easy enough :) we ordered them the week before, she killed them in the morning and brought them to us skinned (but whole) that afternoon. Dad was kind enough to chop them up into bits for me :)
- Ask someone you KNOW makes awesome rabbit for their version of the fenkata. I asked my nanna :)
- Invite 4-5 people per rabbit you order - Fenkata is meant to be loud, filling and fun.


All the above steps are very important! :)

10 minute fresh tomato pasta sauce

Got home from the beach the other day and was starving, so whipped up this sauce. It was just me so i guess this is enough sauce for one (if you like heaps of sauce and not as much pasta as I did) however you could just adjust the quantities easily. You can go to the trouble of blanching and peeling the tomatoes, and deseeding them, but like I said i was bloody hungry and on a mission to prepare the sauce and have it done by the time the water boiled and pasta was cooked.

Pasta with Zucchini, Porcini and Shrimps

Pasta with Zucchini, Porcini mushrooms and shrimps.

This idea came to me when my dad and I were deciding what to have for dinner. Had Zucchini, plenty of them to use, and wanted to empty out the freezer also, and had Prawns. I'd also spied a jar of porcini mushrooms in the cupboard teeheehee... and so it was born!