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Home Cooked Lasagna With Homemade Roux

November 28, 2016 by Michele Neylon Leave a Comment

Yesterday was a “cooking day” for me. Apart from the very tasty roast lamb that I made, I also prepared lasagna. Why? Well I like lasagna, but I also like to make my own lunch during the week. I normally opt for a lightish lunch and have a heavier meal in the evening. Changing things around a little suits me.

So I made a trip to my local Tesco and grabbed a couple of the ingredients that I didn’t have in my kitchen. The main ingredient I was missing was the right kind of flour. Sure, plain flour would probably have worked out okay, but I was trying to follow one of several Italian recipes for the white bechamel sauce (roux) which required farina tip OO, which you can find in Tesco, but not in most other Irish supermarkets. It’s also the same kind of flour you can use for making your own pasta or pizza.. so it’ll definitely get used.

I also needed to pick up some butter, as I rarely use it. I ended up with some Glenstal butter, which was slightly cheaper than any of the other brands they were offering. (Tesco’s own brand might have been a little bit cheaper, but I like to buy Irish and support known suppliers when I can).

Lasagna is not a complicated dish to prepare.

You only really need three elements:

the ragù(your pasta sauce)
the lasagna pasta sheets (if you can get lasagna verde do – it’s wonderful!)
the white sauce and some cheese OR a white cheese sauce (the net effect is pretty much the same)

Making a ragù isn’t hard and there are literally hundreds of variants for recipes out there. Using some fresh herbs and a glass or two of red wine helps add rich flavour to the sauce.

Personally I like using ingredients like celery, grated carrot, garlic, onion, mushrooms, fresh tomatoes (chopped) and obviously beef mince. I also use my pressure cooker to make the sauce to save a bit of time.

I hadn’t made a roux in ages, but it came back to me fairly quickly.

A roux is a base sauce from which you can make many other sauces. You make it by melting butter and then mixing in flour and milk. You can add some ground nutmeg for a bit of extra flavour.

Melting butter over a low to medium heat. It’s tempting to turn up the heat, but if you do the butter can easily burn.

The end product, more or less. It was a bit thicker than I would have liked, but I could have thinned it out by adding more milk. I also need to get a better whisk! The fancy looking lime green one pictured is horrible to use.

Cooking the entire thing only takes about 25 minutes. I covered the top of it with grated mozzarella before popping it in the oven and it turned out pretty well

and after 25 minutes at about 180C

I tasted it last night and was quite happy with how it turned out. Today, however, was the real test, as it was my lunch for the day

Verdict? I’m very happy with how it turned out. The bechamel / white sauce / roux could have been thinner and that would probably have improved things a little.

Packing a reasonable slice of lasagna to bring it into the office I noticed that I don’t have any small container for grated cheese, so I had to resort to using quite a big one – another thing for my “todo” list!

My First Attempt at Cooking Rabbit Cacciatore

November 27, 2016 by Michele Neylon Leave a Comment

As a child we didn’t eat rabbit that often. I do, however, remember having it one time and getting a mouthful of buckshot! At least I knew the rabbit was freshly hunted!

Over the last few years, however, I have eaten rabbit several times in restaurants in France and Belgium. Getting rabbit on a restaurant menu in Ireland, however, doesn’t seem to be that common. You can get rabbit to cook at home, but to do so you either have to rely on friends who hunt rabbits or shops that stock imported rabbits. Yes, we actually import rabbits from other parts of Europe, as there currently aren’t any commercial rabbit farms in Ireland. Some butchers do stock wild rabbit meat, but most don’t.

In my case one of my staff was able to get me a wild rabbit.

Luckily for me they’d already skinned it and chopped it up a bit.

I like Italian style cooking so I made a “cacciatore” style dish with mine using a combination of Elise Bauer’s recipe and Antonio Carluccio’s “Coniglio alla Cacciatora”. I wasn’t sure which recipe to go with so I ended up combining them, as I’d already bought (or acquired) the ingredients for both.

You start by dusting the rabbit meat with flour

Then you fry it in olive oil to seal the meat

I love cooking with fresh herbs so I was delighted to get a nice big bunch of fresh rosemary from a friend’s garden, which combined with a few cloves of garlic add plenty of deep flavour to the meat.

The rich aroma of rosemary and garlic filled the kitchen, which is probably one of the reasons I enjoy cooking so much. Sure, I enjoy eating the food, but I really love the deep aroma as the food cooks.

Now to make it all the more interesting, and isn’t that what cooking is all about, I added about 2/3 of a bottle of dry white wine, as well as some tomatoes, some bay leaves, peppers and mushrooms into the pan and let it all cook for about an hour.

As an aside, I don’t usually drink white wine, but it would have been rude to ignore the glass or two of wine that was left in the bottle, so I obviously drank it ..

If you’re not a white wine drinker this guide is handy for helping select the right kind of wine for cooking.

I use a very big and quite heavy pan with a tightly fitting lid for a lot of my day to day cooking, as it’s very good at doing these kind of stew type things. Sure, I could cheat and use a pressure cooker, but for something like this I thought the extra investment of time in the cooking was worth it.

And here’s a really short video showing it cooking away:

A few minutes before serving I added a few black and green olives into the stew which adds a bit of colour and even more flavour.

After about an hour the rabbit was ready and I served it with some boiled new potatoes. There was enough left over for a second evening’s dinner, which saved cooking!

Overall I was very happy with how it turned out.

A few things I learnt, however, rabbit is a bit like chicken, in that there are some parts which are quite bulky but don’t have much meat. You’ll get most of the meat from the legs.

The meat is pretty tasty and quite similar to chicken, though a lot more “gamey’.

I’ve no idea when I’ll be able to get my hands on a rabbit again, but I’ll definitely cook it again if I can.

Spaghetti Carbonara

September 6, 2015 by Michele Neylon 2 Comments

I’ve always liked carbonara. It’s one of those dishes that isn’t complicated, but is incredibly tasty. I guess it proves that you don’t need elaborate “fussy” recipes to get good, tasty food.

It’s not a super lean or low calorie dish, but it’s good quality food and free of processed junk.

And no, you don’t need mushrooms or cream to make carbonara. In fact if you add either ingredient it’s no longer carbonara.

So here’s the recipe I use. You can tweak it depending on what you can get your hands on. For example, pancetta is more widely available in Irish supermarkets these days, but it you can use bacon rashers if you need to. The more “traditional” recipes talk about using blocks of pancetta and slicing it off them, but I’ve never found pancetta for sale in Ireland in that form. If anyone knows of shops selling it please let me know via the comments!

Spaghetti Carbonara

A simple yet tasty Italian staple

Course Dinner

Cuisine Italian

Keyword bacon, italian, pasta, spaghetti

Prep Time 5 minutes

Cook Time 8 minutes

Total Time 13 minutes

Servings 2

Calories 600 kcal

Ingredients

2 - 3 eggs depending on size free range eggs are always best
1 - 2 cloves of garlic peeled and chopped or sliced thinly
1/2 packed of pancetta most packets come with two separate sections
100 g spaghetti
grated parmesan freshly grated is best
freshly ground black pepper

Instructions

Prepare the spaghetti al dente as usual
While the spaghetti is cooking (usually 6 to 8 minutes) fry the pancetta with garlic. You might need to add a small bit of oil to the pan, but pancetta has a lot of its own oils
Break the eggs into a bowl and beat them. Add a bit of the black pepper and some of the parmesan
When the spaghetti is ready drain it
Combine the spaghetti and eggs in a large bowl, then add the pancetta with garlic.
Mix the pancetta and garlic well so that they're relatively well mixed into the pasta
Serve and enjoy!

italian

Spaghetti Carbonara

Ingredients

Instructions

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